The entire romance is divided into five books, and is carefully constructed and finished. Some of Lope’s own experiences at Valencia and elsewhere evidently contributed materials for it; but a poetical coloring is thrown over the whole, and, except in some of the details about the city, and descriptions of natural scenery, we rarely feel that what we read is absolutely true.[245] The story, especially when regarded from the point of view chosen by its author, is interesting; and it is not only one of the earliest specimens in Spanish literature of the class to which it belongs, but one of the best.[246]
Passing over some of his minor poems and his “New Art of Writing Plays,” for noticing both of which more appropriate occasions will occur hereafter, we come to another of Lope’s greater efforts, his “Jerusalem Conquered,” which appeared in 1609, and was twice reprinted in the course of the next ten years. He calls it “a tragic epic,” and divides it into twenty books of octave rhymes, comprehending, when taken together, above twenty-two thousand verses. The attempt was certainly an ambitious one, since we see, on its very face, that it is nothing less than to rival Tasso on the ground where Tasso’s success had been so brilliant.
As might have been foreseen, Lope failed. His very subject is unfortunate, for it is not the conquest of Jerusalem by the Christians, but the failure of Cœur de Lion to rescue it from the infidels in the end of the twelfth century;—a theme evidently unfit for a Christian epic. All the poet could do, therefore, was to take the series of events as he found them in history, and, adding such episodes and ornaments as his own genius could furnish, give to the whole as much as possible of epic form, dignity, and completeness. But Lope has not done even this. He has made merely a long narrative poem, of which Richard is the hero; and he relies for success, in no small degree, on the introduction of a sort of rival hero, in the person of Alfonso the Eighth of Castile, who, with his knights, is made, after the fourth book, to occupy a space in the foreground of the action quite disproportionate and absurd, since it is certain that Alfonso was never in Palestine at all.[247] What is equally inappropriate, the real subject of the poem is ended in the eighteenth book, by the return home of both Richard and Alfonso; the nineteenth being filled with the Spanish king’s subsequent history, and the twentieth with the imprisonment of Richard and the quiet death of Saladin, as master of Jerusalem,—a conclusion so abrupt and unsatisfactory, that it seems as if its author could hardly have originally foreseen it.
But though, with the exception of what relates to the apocryphal Spanish adventurers, the series of historical events in that brilliant crusade is followed down with some regard to the truth of fact, still we are so much confused by the visions and allegorical personages mingled in the narrative, and by the manifold episodes and love-adventures which interrupt it, that it is all but impossible to read any considerable portion consecutively and with attention. Lope’s easy and graceful versification is, indeed, to be found here, as it is in nearly all his poetry; but even on the holy ground of chivalry, at Cyprus, Ptolemais, and Tyre, his narrative has much less movement and life than we might claim from its subject, and almost everywhere else it is languid and heavy. Of plan, proportions, or a skilful adaptation of the several parts so as to form an epic whole, there is no thought; and yet Lope intimates that his poem was written with care some time before it was published,[248] and he dedicates it to his king, in a tone indicating that he thought it by no means unworthy the royal favor.
CHAPTER XIV.
Lope de Vega, continued. — His Relations with the Church. — His Pastores de Belen. — His Religious Poems. — His Connection with the Festivals at the Beatification and Canonization of San Isidro. — Tomé de Burguillos. — La Gatomachia. — An Auto da Fé. — Triunfos Divinos. — Poem on Mary Queen of Scots. — Laurel de Apolo. — Dorotea. — His Old Age and Death.
Just at the time the Jerusalem was published, Lope began to wear the livery of his Church. Indeed, it is on the title-page of this very poem that he, for the first time, announces himself as a “Familiar of the Holy Inquisition.” Proofs of the change in his life are soon apparent in his works. In 1612, he published “The Shepherds of Bethlehem,” a long pastoral in prose and verse, divided into five books. It contains the sacred history, according to the more popular traditions of the author’s Church, from the birth of Mary, the Saviour’s mother, to the arrival of the holy family in Egypt,—all supposed to be related or enacted by shepherds in the neighbourhood of Bethlehem, at the time the events occurred.
Like the other prose pastorals written at the same period, it is full of incongruities. Some of the poems, in particular, are as inappropriate and in as bad taste as can well be conceived; and why three or four poetical contests for prizes and several common Spanish games are introduced at all, it is not easy to imagine, since they are permitted by the conditions of no possible poetical theory for such fictions. But it must be confessed, on the other hand, that there runs through the whole an air of amenity and gentleness well suited to its subject and purpose. Several stories from the Old Testament are gracefully told, and translations from the Psalms and other parts of the Jewish Scriptures are brought in with a happy effect. Some of the original poetry, too, is to be placed among the best of Lope’s minor compositions;—such as the following imaginative little song, which is supposed to have been sung in a palm-grove, by the Madonna, to her sleeping child, and is as full of the tenderest feelings of Catholic devotion as one of Murillo’s pictures on the same subject:—
Holy angels and blest,