It must be admitted, however, that there is some confusion in this matter. The ballads bear witness to the jealousy felt by Isabela on account of his relations with another fair lady, who passes under the name of Filis,—a jealousy which seems to have caused him no small embarrassment; for while, in some of his verses, he declares it has no foundation, in others he admits and justifies it.[218] But however this may have been, a very short time after Isabela’s death he made no secret of his passion for the rival who had disturbed her peace. He was not, however, successful. For some reason or other, the lady rejected his suit. He was in despair, as his ballads prove; but his despair did not last long. In less than a year from the death of Isabela it was all over, and he had again taken, to amuse and distract his thoughts, the genuine Spanish resource of becoming a soldier.
The moment in which he made this decisive change in his life was one when a spirit of military adventure was not unlikely to take possession of a character always seeking excitement; for it was just as Philip the Second was preparing the portentous Armada, with which he hoped, by one blow, to overthrow the power of Elizabeth and bring back a nation of heretics to the bosom of the Church. Lope, therefore, as he tells us in one of his eclogues, finding the lady of his love would not smile upon him, took his musket on his shoulder, amidst the universal enthusiasm of 1588, marched to Lisbon, and, accompanied by his faithful friend Conde, went on board the magnificent armament destined for England, where, he says, he used up for wadding the verses he had written in his lady’s praise.[219]
A succession of disasters followed this ungallant jest. His brother, from whom he had long been separated, and whom he now found as a lieutenant on board the Saint John, in which he himself served, died in his arms of a wound received during a fight with the Dutch. Other great troubles crowded after this one. Storms scattered the unwieldy fleet; calamities of all kinds confounded prospects that had just before been so full of glory; and Lope must have thought himself but too happy, when, after the Armada had been dispersed or destroyed, he was brought back in safety, first to Cadiz and afterwards to Toledo and Madrid, reaching the last city, probably, in 1590. It is a curious fact, however, in his personal history, that, amidst all the terrors and sufferings of this disastrous expedition, he found leisure and quietness of spirit to write the greater part of his long poem on “The Beauty of Angelica,” which he intended as a continuation of the “Orlando Furioso.”[220]
But Lope could not well return from such an expedition without something of that feeling of disappointment which, with the nation at large, accompanied its failure. Perhaps it was owing to this that he entered again on the poor course of life of which he had already made an experiment with the Duke of Alva, and became secretary, first of the Marquis of Malpica and afterwards of the generous Marquis of Sarria, who, as Count de Lemos, was, a little later, the patron of Cervantes and the Argensolas. While he was in the service of the last distinguished nobleman, and already known as a dramatist, he became attached to Doña Juana de Guardio, a lady of good family in Madrid, whom he married in 1597; and soon afterwards leaving the Count de Lemos, had never any other patrons than those whom, like the Duke de Sessa, his literary fame procured for him.[221]
Lope had now reached the age of thirty-five, and seems to have enjoyed a few years of happiness, to which he often alludes, and which, in two of his poetical epistles, he has described with much gentleness and grace.[222] But it did not last long. A son, Carlos, to whom he was tenderly attached, lived only to his seventh year;[223] and the mother, broken down by grief at his loss, soon died, giving birth, at the same time, to Feliciana,[224] who was afterwards married to Don Luis de Usategui, the editor of some of his father-in-law’s posthumous works. Lope seems to have felt bitterly his desolate estate after the death of his wife and son, and speaks of it with much feeling in a poem addressed to his faithful friend Conde.[225] But in 1605 an illegitimate daughter was born to him, whom he named Marcela,—the same to whom, in 1620, he dedicated one of his plays, with extraordinary expressions of affection and admiration,[226] and who, in 1621, took the veil and retired from the world, renewing griefs which, with his views of religion, he desired rather to bear with patience, and even with pride.[227] In 1606, the same lady—Doña María de Luxan—who was the mother of Marcela bore him a son, whom he named Lope, and who, at the age of fourteen, appears among the poets at the canonization of San Isidro.[228] But though his father had fondly destined him for a life of letters, he insisted on becoming a soldier, and, after serving under the Marquis of Santa Cruz against the Dutch and the Turks, perished, when only fifteen years old, in a vessel which was totally lost at sea with all on board.[229] Lope poured forth his sorrows in a piscatory eclogue, less full of feeling than the verses in which he describes Marcela taking the veil.[230]
After the birth of these two children, we hear nothing more of their mother. Indeed, soon afterwards, Lope, no longer at an age to be deluded by his passions, began, according to the custom of his time and country, to turn his thoughts seriously to religion. He devoted himself to pious works, as his father had done; visited the hospitals regularly; resorted daily to a particular church; entered a secular religious congregation; and finally, at Toledo, in 1609, received the tonsure and became a priest. The next year he joined the same brotherhood of which Cervantes was afterwards a member.[231] In 1625, he entered the congregation of the native priesthood of Madrid, and was so faithful and exact in the performance of his duties, that, in 1628, he was elected to be its chief chaplain. He is, therefore, for the twenty-six latter years of his long life, to be regarded as strictly connected with the Spanish Church, and as devoting to its daily service some portion of his time.
But we must not misunderstand the position in which, through these relations, Lope had now placed himself, nor overrate the sacrifices they required of him. Such a connection with the Church, in his time, by no means involved an abandonment of the world,—hardly an abandonment of its pleasures. On the contrary, it was rather regarded as one of the means for securing the leisure suited to a life of letters and social ease. As such, unquestionably, Lope employed it; for, during the long series of years in which he was a priest, and gave regular portions of his time to offices of devotion and charity, he was at the height of favor and fashion as a poet. And, what may seem to us more strange, it was during the same period he produced the greater number of his dramas, not a few of whose scenes offend against the most unquestioned precepts of Christian morality, while, at the same time, in their title-pages and dedications, he carefully sets forth his clerical distinctions, giving peculiar prominence to his place as a Familiar or Servant of the Holy Office of the Inquisition.[232]
It was, however, during the happier period of his married life that he laid the foundations for his general popularity as a poet. His subject was well chosen. It was that of the great fame and glory of San Isidro the Ploughman. This remarkable personage, who plays so distinguished a part in the ecclesiastical history of Madrid, is supposed to have been born in the twelfth century, on what afterwards became the site of that city, and to have led a life so eminently pious, that the angels came down and ploughed his grounds for him, which the holy man neglected in order to devote his time to religious duties. From an early period, therefore, he enjoyed much consideration, and was regarded as the patron and friend of the whole territory, as well as of the city of Madrid itself. But his great honors date from the year 1598. In that year Philip the Third was dangerously ill at a neighbouring village; the city sent out the remains of Isidro in procession to avert the impending calamity; the king recovered; and for the first time the holy man became widely famous and fashionable.
Lope seized the occasion, and wrote a long poem on the life of “Isidro the Ploughman,” or Farmer; so called to distinguish him from the learned saint of Seville who bore the same name. It consists of ten thousand lines, exactly divided among the ten books of which it is composed; and yet it was finished within the year, and published in 1599. It has no high poetical merit, and does not, indeed, aspire to any. But it was intended to be popular, and succeeded. It is written in the old national five-line stanza, carefully rhymed throughout; and, notwithstanding the apparent difficulty of the measure, it everywhere affords unequivocal proof of that facility and fluency of versification for which Lope became afterwards so famous. Its tone, which, on the most solemn matters of religion, is so familiar that we should now consider it indecorous, was no doubt in full consent with the spirit of the times and one main cause of its success. Thus, in Canto Third, where the angels come to Isidro and his wife Mary, who are too poor to entertain them, Lope describes the scene—which ought to be as solemn as any thing in the poem, since it involves the facts on which Isidro’s claim to canonization was subsequently admitted—in the following light verses, which may serve as a specimen of the measure and style of the whole:—
Three angels, sent by grace divine,