The sensation produced by his death was such as is rarely witnessed even in the case of those upon whom depends the welfare of nations. The Duke of Sessa, who was his especial patron, and to whom he left his manuscripts, provided for the funeral in a manner becoming his own wealth and rank. It lasted nine days. The crowds that thronged to it were immense. Three bishops officiated, and the first nobles of the land attended as mourners. Eulogies and poems followed on all sides, and in numbers all but incredible. Those written in Spain make one considerable volume, and end with a drama in which his apotheosis was brought upon the public stage. Those written in Italy are hardly less numerous, and fill another.[277] But more touching than any of them was the prayer of that much-loved daughter who had been shut up from the world fourteen years, that the long funeral procession might pass by her convent and permit her once more to look on the face she so tenderly venerated; and more solemn than any was the mourning of the multitude, from whose dense mass audible sobs burst forth, as his remains slowly descended from their sight into the house appointed for all living.[278]
CHAPTER XV.
Lope de Vega, continued. — Character of his Miscellaneous Works. — His Dramas. — His Life at Valencia. — His Moral Plays. — His Success at Madrid. — Vast Number of his Dramas. — Their Foundation and their Various Forms. — His Comedias de Capa y Espada, and their Characteristics.
The works of Lope de Vega that we have considered, while tracing his long and brilliant career, are far from being sufficient to explain the degree of popular admiration that, almost from the first, followed him. They show, indeed, much original talent, a still greater power of invention, and a wonderful facility of versification. But they are rarely imbued with the deep and earnest spirit of a genuine poetry; they generally have an air of looseness and want of finish; and almost all of them are without that national physiognomy and character, in which, after all, resides so much of the effective power of genius over any people.
The truth is, that Lope, in what have been called his miscellaneous works, was seldom in the path that leads to final success. He was turned aside by a spirit which, if not that of the whole people, was the spirit of the court and the higher classes of Castilian society. Boscan and Garcilasso, who preceded him by only half a century, had made themselves famous by giving currency to the lighter forms of Italian verse, especially those of the sonnet and the canzone; and Lope, who found these fortunate poets the idols of the period, when his own character was forming, thought that to follow their brilliant course would open to him the best chances for success. His aspirations, however, stretched very far beyond theirs. He felt other and higher powers within him, and entered boldly into rivalship, not only with Sannazaro and Bembo, as they had done, but with Ariosto, Tasso, and Petrarch. Eleven of his longer poems, epic, narrative, and descriptive, are in the stately ottava rima of his great masters; besides which he has left us two long pastorals in the manner of the “Arcadia,” many adventurous attempts in the terza rima, and numberless specimens of all the varieties of Italian lyrics, including, among the rest, nearly seven hundred sonnets.
But in all this there is little that is truly national,—little that is marked with the old Castilian spirit; and if this were all he had done, his fame would by no means stand where we now find it. His prose pastorals and his romances are, indeed, better than his epics; and his didactic poetry, his epistles, and his elegies are occasionally excellent; but it is only when he touches fairly and fully upon the soil of his country,—it is only in his glosas, his letrillas, his ballads, and his light songs and roundelays, that he has the richness and grace which should always have accompanied him. We feel at once, therefore, whenever we meet him in these paths, that he is on ground he should never have deserted, because it is ground on which, with his extraordinary gifts, he could easily have erected permanent monuments to his own fame. But he himself determined otherwise. Not that he entirely approved the innovations of Boscan and Garcilasso; for he tells us distinctly, in his “Philomena,” that their imitations of the Italian had unhappily supplanted the grace and the glory that belonged peculiarly to the old Spanish genius.[279] The theories and fashions of his time, therefore, misled, though they did not delude, a spirit that should have been above them; and the result is, that little of poetry such as marks the old Castilian genius is to be found in the great mass of his works we have thus far been called on to examine. In order to account for his permanent success, as well as marvellous popularity, we must, then, turn to another and wholly distinct department,—that of the drama,—in which he gave himself up to the leading of the national spirit as completely as if he had not elsewhere seemed sedulously to avoid it; and thus obtained a kind and degree of fame he could never otherwise have reached.
It is not possible to determine the year when Lope first began to write for the public stage; but whenever it was, he found the theatre in a rude and humble condition. That he was very early drawn to this form of composition, though not, perhaps, for the purposes of representation, we know on his own authority; for, in his pleasant didactic poem on the New Art of Making Plays, which he published in 1609, but read several years earlier to a society of dilettanti in Madrid, he says expressly,—
The Captain Virues, a famous wit,
Cast dramas in three acts, by happy hit;