It is impossible to speak of Cervantes as the great genius of the Spanish nation without recalling Lope de Vega, the rival who far surpassed him in contemporary popularity, and rose, during the lifetime of both, to a degree of fame which no Spaniard had yet attained, and which has been since reached by few of any country. To the examination, therefore, of this great man’s claims—which extend to almost every department of the national literature—we naturally turn, after examining those of the author of Don Quixote.
Lope Felix de Vega Carpio was born on the 25th of November, 1562, at Madrid, whither his father had recently removed, almost by accident, from the old family estate of Vega, in the picturesque valley of Carriedo.[200] From his earliest youth he discovered extraordinary powers. At five years of age, we are assured by his friend Montalvan, that he could not only read Latin as well as Spanish, but that he had such a passion for poetry as to pay his more advanced school-fellows with a share of his breakfast for writing down the verses he dictated to them, before he had learned to do it for himself.[201] His father, who, he intimates, was a poet,[202] and who was much devoted to works of charity in the latter years of his life, died when he was very young, and left, besides Lope, a son who perished in the Armada in 1588, and a daughter who died in 1601. In the period immediately following the father’s death, the family seems to have been scattered by poverty; and during this interval Lope probably lived with his uncle, the Inquisitor, Don Miguel de Carpio, of whom he long afterwards speaks with great respect.[203]
But though the fortunes of his house were broken, his education was not neglected. He was sent to the Imperial College at Madrid, and in two years made extraordinary progress in ethics and in elegant literature, avoiding, as he tells us, the mathematics, which he found unsuited to his humor, if not to his genius. Accomplishments, too, were added,—fencing, dancing, and music; and he was going on in a way to gratify the wishes of his friends, when, at the age of fourteen, a wild, giddy desire to see the world took possession of him; and, accompanied by a schoolfellow, he ran away from college. At first, they went on foot for two or three days. Then they bought a sorry horse, and travelled as far as Astorga, in the northwestern part of Spain, not far from the old fief of the Vega family; but there, growing tired of their journey, and missing more seriously than they had anticipated the comforts to which they had been accustomed, they determined to come home. At Segovia, they attempted, in a silversmith’s shop, to exchange some doubloons and a gold chain for small coin, but were suspected to be thieves and arrested. The magistrate, however, before whom they were brought, being satisfied that they were guilty of nothing but folly, released them; though, wishing to do a kindness to their friends, as well as to themselves, he sent an officer of justice to deliver them safely in Madrid.[204]
At the age of fifteen, as he tells us in one of his poetical epistles, he was serving as a soldier against the Portuguese in Terceira;[205] but only a little later than this, we know that he filled some place about the person of Gerónimo Manrique, Bishop of Avila, to whose kindness he acknowledged himself to be much indebted, and in whose honor he wrote several eclogues, and inserted a long passage in his “Jerusalem.”[206] Under the patronage of Manrique, he was, probably, sent to the University of Alcalá, where he certainly studied some time, and not only took the degree of Bachelor, but was near submitting himself to the irrevocable tonsure of the priesthood.[207]
But, as we learn from some of his own accounts, he now fell in love. Indeed, if we are to believe the tales he tells of himself in his “Dorothea,” which was written in his youth and printed with the sanction of his old age, he suffered great extremity from that passion when he was only seventeen. Some of the stories of that remarkable dramatic romance, in which he figures under the name of Fernando, are, it may be hoped, fictitious;[208] though it must be admitted that others, like the scene between the hero and Dorothea, in the first act, the account of his weeping behind the door with Marfisa, on the day she was to be married to another, and most of the narrative parts in the fourth act, have an air of reality about them that hardly permits us to doubt they were true.[209] Taken together, however, they do him little credit as a young man of honor and a cavalier.
From Alcalá Lope came to Madrid, and attached himself to the Duke of Alva; not, as it has been generally supposed, the remorseless favorite of Philip the Second, but Antonio, the great Duke’s grandson, who had succeeded to his ancestor’s fortunes without inheriting his formidable spirit.[210] Lope was much liked by his new patron, and rose to be his confidential secretary; living with him both at court and in his retirement at Alva, where letters seem, for a time, to have taken the place of arms and affairs. At the suggestion of the Duke, he wrote his “Arcadia,” a pastoral romance, making a volume of considerable size; and though chiefly in prose, yet with poetry of various kinds freely intermixed. Such compositions, as we have seen, were already in favor in Spain;—the last of them, the “Galatea” of Cervantes, published in 1584, giving, perhaps, occasion to the Arcadia, which seems to have been written almost immediately afterwards. Most of them have one striking peculiarity; that of concealing, under the forms of pastoral life in ancient times, adventures which had really occurred in the times of their respective authors. The Duke was desirous to figure among these somewhat fantastic shepherds and shepherdesses, and therefore induced Lope to write the Arcadia, and make him its hero, furnishing some of his own experiences as materials for the work. At least, so the affair was understood both in Spain and France, when the Arcadia was published, in 1598; besides which, Lope himself, a few years later, in the Preface to some miscellaneous poems, tells us expressly, “The Arcadia is a true history.”[211]
But whether it be throughout a true history or not, it is a very unsatisfactory one. It is commonly regarded as an imitation of its popular namesake, the “Arcadia” of Sannazaro, of which a Spanish translation had appeared in 1547; but it much more resembles the similar works of Montemayor and Cervantes, both in story and style. Metaphysics and magic, as in the “Diana” and “Galatea,” are strangely mixed up with the shows of a pastoral life; and, as in them, we listen with little interest to the perplexities and sorrows of a lover who, from mistaking the feelings of his mistress, treats her in such a way that she marries another, and then, by a series of enchantments, is saved from the effects of his own despair, and his heart is washed so clean, that, like Orlando’s, there is not one spot of love left in it. All this, of course, is unnatural; for the personages it represents are such as can never have existed, and they talk in a language strained above the tone becoming prose; all propriety of costume and manners is neglected; so much learning is crowded into it, that a dictionary is placed at the end to make it intelligible; and it is drawn out to a length which now seems quite absurd, though the editions it soon passed through show that it was not too long for the taste of its time. It should be added, however, that it occasionally furnishes happy specimens of a glowing declamatory eloquence, and that in its descriptions of natural scenery there is often great felicity of imagery and illustration.[212]
About the time when Lope was writing the Arcadia, he married Isabela de Urbina, daughter of the King-at-arms to Philip the Second and Philip the Third; a lady, we are told, not a little loved and admired in the high circle to which she belonged.[213] But his domestic happiness was soon interrupted. He fell into a quarrel with a nobleman of no very good repute; lampooned him in a satirical ballad; was challenged, and wounded his adversary;—in consequence of all which, and of other follies of his youth that seem now to have been brought up against him, he was cast into prison.[214] He was not, however, left without a true friend. Claudio Conde, who on more than one occasion showed a genuine attachment to Lope’s person, accompanied him to his cell, and, when he was released, went with him to Valencia, where Lope himself was treated with extraordinary kindness and consideration, though exposed, he says, at times, to dangers as great as those from which he had suffered so much at Madrid.[215]
The exile of Lope lasted several years, and was chiefly passed at Valencia, then in literary reputation next after Madrid among the cities of Spain. Nor does he seem to have missed the advantages it offered him; for it was, no doubt, during his residence there that he formed a friendship with Gaspar de Aguilar and Guillen de Castro, of which many traces are to be found in his works; while, on the other hand, it is perhaps not unreasonable to assume that the theatre, which was just then beginning to take its form in Valencia, was indebted to the fresh power of Lope for an impulse it never afterwards lost. At any rate, we know that he was much connected with the Valencian poets, and that, a little later, they were among his marked followers in the drama. But his exile was still an exile,—bitter and wearisome to him,—and he gladly returned to Madrid as soon as he could venture there safely.
His home, however, soon ceased to be what it had been. His young wife died in less than a year after his return, and one of his friends, Pedro de Medinilla, joined him in an eclogue to her memory, which is dedicated to Lope’s patron, Antonio Duke of Alva,[216]—a poem of little value, and one that does much less justice to his feelings than some of his numerous verses to the same lady, under the name of Belisa, which are scattered through his own works and found in the old Romanceros.[217]