But gold and silver, hid within the earth,
Are all they truly seek and strive to win.[332]
The greater part of the action and the best portions of it pass in the New World; but it is difficult to imagine any thing more extravagant than the whole fable. Dramatic propriety is constantly set at naught. The Indians, before the appearance of Europeans among them, sing about Phœbus and Diana; and while, from the first, they talk nothing but Spanish, they frequently pretend, after the arrival of the Spaniards, to be unable to understand a word of their language. The scene in which Idolatry pleads its cause against Christianity before Divine Providence, the scenes with the Demon, and those touching the conversion of the heathen, might have been presented in the rudest of the old Moralities. Those, on the contrary, in which the natural feelings and jealousies of the simple and ignorant natives are brought out, and those in which Columbus appears,—always dignified and gentle,—are not without merit. Few, however, can be said to be truly good or poetical; and yet a poetical interest is kept up through the worst of them, and the story they involve is followed to the end with a living curiosity.
The common traditions are repeated, that Columbus was born at Nervi, and that he received from a dying pilot at Madeira the charts that led him to his grand adventure; but it is singular, that, in contradiction to all this, Lope, in other parts of the play, should have hazarded the suggestion, that Columbus was moved by Divine inspiration. The friar, in the scene of the mutiny, declares it expressly; and Columbus himself, in his discourse with his brother Bartholomew, when their fortunes seemed all but desperate, plainly alludes to it, when he says,—
A hidden Deity still drives me on,
Bidding me trust the truth of what I feel,
And, if I watch, or if I sleep, impels
The strong will boldly to work out its way.
But what is this that thus possesses me?
What spirit is it drives me onward thus?