Yet his chief glory must, like Burns's, be ever local. Cervantes, for all his national savour, might conceivably belong to any country; but Lope de Vega is the incarnate Spains. His gaiety, his suppleness, his adroit construction, his affluence, his realism, are eminently Spanish in their strength; his heedless form, his journalistic emphasis, his inequality, his occasional incoherence, his anxiety to please at any cost, are eminently Spanish in their weakness. He lacks the universal note of Shakespeare, being chiefly for his own time and not for all the ages. Shakespeare, however, stands alone in literature. It is no small praise to say that Lope follows him on a lower plane. There are two great creators in the European drama: Shakespeare founds the English theatre, Lope de Vega the Spanish, each interpreting the genius of his people with unmatched supremacy. And unto both there came a period of eclipse. That very generation which Lope had bewildered, dominated, and charmed by his fantasy turned to the worship of Calderón. Nor did he profit by the romantic movement headed by the Schlegels and by Tieck. For them, as for Goethe, Spanish literature was incarnated by Cervantes and by Calderón. The immense bulk of Lope's production, the rarity of his editions, the absence of any representative translation, caused him to be overlooked. To two men—to Agustín Durán in Spain and to Grillparzer in Germany—he owes his revival;[24] and, in more modest degree, Lord Holland and George Henry Lewes have furthered his due recognition. The present tendency is, perhaps, to overrate him, and to substitute uncritical adoration for uncritical neglect. Yet he deserves the fame which grows from day to day; for if he have bequeathed us little that is exquisite in art—as Los Pastores de Belén—the world is his debtor for a new and singular form of dramatic utterance. In so much he is not only a great executant in the romantic drama, a virtuoso of unexcelled resource and brilliancy. He is something still greater: the typical representative of his race, the founder of a great and comprehensive genre. The genius of Cervantes was universal and unique; Lope's was unique but national. Cervantes had the rarer and more perfect endowment. But they are immortals both; and, paradox though it may seem, a second Cervantes is a likelier miracle than a second Lope de Vega.
In 1599, the year following upon the issue of Lope's Dragontea, the picaresque tradition of Lazarillo de Tormes was revived by the Sevillan Mateo Alemán (fl. ? 1550-1609) in the First Part of his Atalaya de la Vida humana: Vida del Pícaro Guzmán de Alfarache. The alternative title—the Watch-Tower of Human Life—was rejected by the reading public, which, to the author's annoyance, insisted on speaking of the Pícaro or Rogue. Little is known of Alemán's life, save that he took his Bachelor's degree at Seville in 1565. He is conjectured to have visited Italy, perhaps as a soldier, is found serving in the Treasury so early as 1568, and, after twenty years, left the King's service as poor as he entered it. A passage in his Ortografía Castellana, published at Mexico in 1609, is thought to show that he was a printer; but this is surmise. That he emigrated to America seems certain; but the date of his death is unknown.
His Guzmán de Alfarache is an amplified version of Lázaro's adventures; and, though he adds little to the first conception, his abundant episode and interminable moralisings hit the general taste. Twenty-six editions, amounting to some fifty thousand copies, appeared within six years of the first publication: not even Don Quixote had such a vogue. Nor was it less fortunate abroad. In 1623 it was admirably translated by James Mabbe in a version for which Ben Jonson wrote a copy of verses in praise of
"this Spanish Proteus; who, though writ
But in one tongue, was form'd with the world's wit;
And hath the noblest mark of a good book,
That an ill man dares not securely look
Upon it, but will loathe, or let it pass,
As a deformed face doth a true glass."