[24] See M. Farinelli's learned study, Grillparzer und Lope de Vega (Berlin, 1894).
[25] It seems probable that Cervantes and Pérez were both anticipated by Alonso Álvarez de Soria, who was finally hanged. See Bartolomé José Gallardo, Ensayo de una Biblioteca Española (Madrid, 1863, vol. i., col. 285).
CHAPTER X
THE AGE OF FELIPE IV. AND CARLOS THE BEWITCHED
1621-1700
The reign of Felipe IV. opens with as fair a promise of achievement as any in history. At Madrid, in the third and fourth decades of the seventeenth century, the court of the Grand Monarque was anticipated and perhaps outdone. We are inclined to think of Felipe as Velázquez has presented him, on his "Cordobese barb, the proud king of horses, and the fittest horse for a king"; and to recall the praise which William Cavendish, first Duke of Newcastle, lavished on his horsemanship:—"The great King of Spain, deceased, did not only love it and understand it, but was absolutely the best horseman in all Spain." Yet is it a mistake to suppose him a mere hunter. Art and letters were his constant care; nor was he without a touch of individual accomplishment. He was not content with instructing his Ministers to buy every good picture offered in foreign markets: his own sketches show that he had profited by seeing Velázquez at work. It is no small point in his favour to have divined at a glance the genius of the unknown Sevillan master, and to have appointed him—scarcely out of his teens—court-painter. He likewise collated the artist, Alonso Cano, to a canonry at Granada, and, when the chapter protested that Cano had small Latin and less Greek, the King's reply was honourable to his taste and spirit:—"With a stroke of the pen I can make canons like you by the score; but Alonso Cano is a miracle of God." He would even stay the course of justice to protect an artist. Thus, when Velázquez's master, the half-mad Herrera, was charged with coining, the monarch intervened with the remark: "Remember his St. Hermengild." Music becalmed the King's fever, and the plays at the Buen Retiro vied with the masques of Whitehall. His antechambers were thronged with men of genius. Lope de Vega still survived, his glory waxing daily, though the best part of his life's work was finished. Vélez de Guevara was the royal chamberlain; Góngora, the court chaplain, hated, envied, and admired, was the dreaded chief of a combative poetic school; his disciple, Villamediana, struck terror with his vitriolic epigrams, his rancorous tongue; the aged Mariana represented the best tradition of Spanish history; Bartolomé de Argensola was official chronicler of Aragón; Tirso de Molina, Ruiz de Alarcón, and Rojas Zorrilla filled the theatres with their brilliant and ingenious fancies; the incorruptible satirist, Quevedo, was private secretary to the King; the boyish Calderón was growing into repute and royal favour.
Of the Aragonese playwright, Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola, we have already spoken in a previous chapter. His brother, Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola (1562-1631), took orders, and, through the influence of the Duque de Villahermosa, was named rector of the town whence his patron took his title. His earliest work, the Conquista de las Islas Molucas (1609), written by order of the Conde de Lemos, is uncritical in conception and design; but the matter of its primitive, romantic, and even sentimental legends derives fresh charm from the author's apt and polished narrative. In 1611 he and his brother accompanied Lemos to Naples, thereby stirring the anger of Cervantes, who had hoped to be among the Viceroy's suite, as appears from a passage in the Viaje del Parnaso, which roundly insinuates that the Argensolas were a pair of intriguers. The disappointment was natural; yet posterity is even grateful for it, since a transfer to Naples would certainly have lost us the second Don Quixote. Doubtless the Argensolas, who were of Italian descent, were better fitted than Cervantes for commerce with Italian affairs, and Bartolomé made friends on all sides in Naples as in Rome. On his brother's death in 1613, he became official chronicler of Aragón, and, in 1631, published a sequel to Zurita, the Anales de Aragón, which deals so minutely with the events of the years 1516-20 as to become wearisome, despite all Argensola's grace of manner. The Rimas of the two brothers, published posthumously in 1634 by Lupercio's son, Gabriel Leonardo de Albión, was stamped with the approval of the dictator, Lope de Vega, who declared that the authors "had come from Aragón to reform among our poets the Castilian language, which is suffering from new horrible phrases, more puzzling than enlightening."
This is an overstatement of a truth, due to Lope's aversion from Gongorism in all its shapes. Horace is the model of the Argensolas, whose renderings of the two odes Ibam forte via sacra and Beatus ille are among the happiest of versions. Their sobriety of thought is austere, and their classic correctness of diction is in curious contrast with the daring innovations of their time. Lupercio has a polite, humorous fancy, which shows through Mr. Gibson's translation of a well-known sonnet:—
"I must confess, Don John, on due inspection,
That dame Elvira's charming red and white,