The historical drama of Lope was but a deviation from the more truly national type of the “Comedia de Capa y Espada,” made by the introduction of historical names for its leading personages, instead of those that belong to fashionable and knightly life. This, however, was not the only deviation he made.[352] He went sometimes quite as far on the other side, and created a variety or subdivision of the theatre, founded on common life, in which the chief personages, like those of “The Watermaid,” and “The Slave of her Lover,” belong to the lower classes of society.[353] Of such dramas he has left only a few, but these few are interesting.
Perhaps the best specimen of them is “The Wise Man at Home,” in which the hero, if he may be so called, is Mendo, the son of a poor charcoal-burner.[354] He has married the only child of a respectable farmer, and is in an easy condition of life, with the road to advancement, at least in a gay course, open before him. But he prefers to remain where he is. He refuses the solicitations of a neighbouring lawyer or clerk, engaged in public affairs, who would have the honest Mendo take upon himself the airs of an hidalgo and caballero. Especially upon what was then the great point in private life,—his relations with his pretty wife,—he shows his uniform good sense, while his more ambitious friend falls into serious embarrassments, and is obliged at last to come to him for counsel and help.
The doctrine of the piece is well explained in the following reply of Mendo to his friend, who had been urging him to lead a more showy life, and raise the external circumstances of his father.
He that was born to live in humble state
Makes but an awkward knight, do what you will.
My father means to die as he has lived,
The same plain collier that he always was;
And I, too, must an honest ploughman die.
’T is but a single step, or up or down;
For men there must be that will plough and dig,