His instinct was right; he moves uneasily in the fetters of verse, and only becomes himself in the prose appendix to the Viage which (as the internal evidence discloses) was written side by side with the Second Part of Don Quixote. His true vehicle was prose, but he was reluctant to abide by the limitations of his genius, and while the sequel to Don Quixote was maturing, he produced a volume of plays containing eight formal full-dress dramas and eight sparkling interludes. By sympathy and by training Cervantes belonged to the older school of dramatists, and his attempts to rival Lope de Vega on Lope’s own ground are mostly embarrassed and, in some cases, curiously maladroit; yet he displays a happy malicious humour in the less ambitious interludes, and, when he betakes himself to prose, he captivates by the spontaneous wit and nimble gaiety of his dialogue. These thumbnail sketches, like the kit-cats of the Novelas Exemplares, may be regarded as so many studies for the Second Part of Don Quixote, at which Cervantes was still working.
This tardy sequel, which followed the First Part at an interval of ten years, might never have seen the light but for the publication of Avellaneda’s apocryphal Don Quixote with its blustering and malignant preface. Cervantes’s gentle spirit survived unembittered by a heavy burden of trials and humiliations; but the proud humility with which (in the preface to his Second Part) he meets Avellaneda’s attack shows how profoundly he resented it. It would have been well had he preserved this attitude in the text. He was taken by surprise and, goaded out of patience, flung his other work aside, and brought Don Quixote to a hurried close. Was Avellaneda’s insolent intrusion a blessing in disguise, or was it disastrous in effect? It is true that but for Avellaneda we might have lost the true sequel as we have lost the Second Part of the Galatea, the Semanas del Jardin, and the rest. It is no less true that, but for Avellaneda, the sequel might have been even better than it actually is. Cervantes had steadily refused to be hurried over his masterpiece, and, so long as he followed his own bent, his work is almost flawless. But Avellaneda suddenly forced him to quicken his step, and in the last chapters Cervantes manifestly writes in furious haste. His art suffers in consequence. His bland amenity deserts him; his eyes wander restlessly from Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to Avellaneda, whom he belabours out of season. He allows himself to be out-generalled, recasting his plan because his foe had stolen it—as though the plan and not the execution were the main essential! He advances, halts, and harks back, uncertain as to his object; he introduces irrelevant personalities and at least one cynical trait unworthy of him. Obviously he is anxious to have the book off his hands, so as to bring confusion on Avellaneda.
That these are blemishes it would be futile to deny; but how insignificant they are beside the positive qualities of the Second Part! Unlike some of his admirers, Cervantes was not above profiting by criticism. He tells us that objection had been taken to the intercalated stories of the First Part, and to some scenes of exuberant fun bordering on horse-play. These faults are avoided in the sequel, which broadens out till it assumes a truly epical grandeur. The development of the two central characters is at once more logical and more poetic; Don Quixote awakens less laughter, and more thought, while Sancho Panza’s store of apophthegms and immemorial wisdom is more inexhaustible and apposite than ever. Lastly, the new personages, from the Duchess downwards to Doctor Pedro Recio de Agüero—the ill-omened physician of Barataria—are marvels of realistic portraiture. The presentation of the crazy knight and the droll squire expands into a splendid pageant of society. And, as one reads the less elaborate passages, one acquires the conviction that the very dust of Cervantes’s writings is gold. The Second Part of Don Quixote was the last of his works that he saw in print. His career was over, and it closed in splendour. His battle was fought and won, and he died, as befits a hero, with the trumpets of victory ringing in his ears.
His labyrinthine romance, Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, appeared in 1617. Even had this posthumous work been, as Cervantes half hoped, ‘the best book of its kind,’ it could scarcely have added to his glory. Though distinctly not the best book of its kind, the great name on its title-page procured it a respectful reception, and it was repeatedly reprinted within a short time of its publication. But it was soon lost in the vast shadow of Don Quixote: no one need feel guilty because he has not read it. The world, leaving scholars and professional critics to estimate the writer’s indebtedness to Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius, has steadily refused to be interested in Persiles y Sigismunda; and in the long run the world delivers a just judgment. It is often led astray by gossip, by influence, by publishers’ tricks, by authors who press their own wares on you with all the effrontery of a cheap-jack at a fair; but the world finds out the truth at last. An author’s genius may be manifest in most or all of his works; but it is wont to be conspicuous in one above the rest. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet: one Hamlet. Cervantes wrote Don Quixote—two Don Quixotes: a feat unparalleled in the history of literature. The one is the foremost of dramatists, and the other the foremost of romancers: and it is to a single masterpiece that each owes the greater part of his transcendent fame.
CHAPTER VII
LOPE DE VEGA
Cervantes is unquestionably the most glorious figure in the annals of Spanish literature, but his very universality makes him less representative of his race. A far more typical local genius is his great rival Lope Félix de Vega Carpio who, for nearly half a century, reigned supreme on the stage at which Cervantes often cast longing eyes. My task would be much easier if I could feel sure that all of you were acquainted with the best and most recent biography of Lope which we owe to a distinguished American scholar, Professor Hugo Albert Rennert. I should then be able to indulge in the luxury of pure literary criticism. As it is, I must attempt to picture to you the prodigious personality of one who has enriched us with an immense library illustrating a new form of dramatic art.
Lope Félix de Vega Carpio, as he signed himself, was born at Madrid on November 25, 1562, just three hundred and forty-five years ago to-day.[100] There is some slight reason to think that his parents—Félix de Vega Carpio and Francisca Hernández Flores—came from the village of Vega in the valley of Carriedo at the foot of the Asturian hills. The historic name of Carpio does not accord well with the modest occupation of Lope’s father who appears to have been a basket-maker; but every respectable Spanish family is more or less noble, and, though Lope was given to displaying a splendidly emblazoned escutcheon in some of his works—a foible which brought down on him the banter of Cervantes and of Góngora—he made no secret of his father’s lowly station. Long afterwards, when Lope de Vega was in the noon of his popularity, Cervantes described him as a monstruo de naturaleza—a portent of nature—and, if we are to believe the legends that float down to us, he must have been a disconcerting wonder as a child—dictating verses before he could write, learning Latin when he was five. A few years later we hear of him as an accomplished dancer and fencer, as an adventurous little truant from the Theatine school at which he was educated, and as a juvenile dramatist. One of his plays belonging to this early period survives, but as a re-cast. It would have been interesting to read the piece in its original form: its title—El Verdadero Amante (The True Lover)—suggests some precocity in a boy of twelve. At an age when most lads are spinning tops Lope was already imagining dramatic situations and impassioned love-scenes.
He appears to have been page to Jerónimo Manrique de Lara, Bishop of Ávila, who helped him to complete his studies at the University of Alcalá de Henares. Lope never forgot a personal kindness, and in the Dragontea he acknowledges his debt to his benefactor whose intention was clearly excellent; but it is doubtful if Lope gained much by his stay at Alcalá except the horrid farrago of undigested learning which disfigures so much of his non-dramatic work, and is so rightly ridiculed by Cervantes. His undergraduate days were scarcely over when he made the acquaintance of Elena Osorio, daughter of a theatrical manager named Jerónimo Velázquez, whom he has celebrated as Filis in his early romances. He fought under Santa Cruz at the Azores in 1582, and next year became secretary to the Marqués de las Navas. He is one of the many poets lauded by Cervantes in the Canto de Calíope, and, though Cervantes bestows his praise indiscriminatingly, it may be inferred that Lope enjoyed a certain reputation when the Galatea was published in 1585. He was then twenty-three, and was no doubt already a practised playwright: his acquaintance with Velázquez would probably open the theatres to him, and enable him to get a hearing on the stage. So far this intimacy was valuable to Lope, but it finally came near to wrecking his career. Elena Osorio was not apparently a model of constancy, and Lope was a passionate, jealous, headstrong youth with a sharp pen. On December 29, 1587, he was arrested at the theatre for libelling his fickle flame and her father, and on February 7, 1588, he was exiled from Madrid for eight years, and from Castile for two. The court seems to have anticipated that Lope might not think fit to obey its order, for it provided that if he returned to Madrid before the fixed limit of time he was to be sent to the galleys, and that if he entered Castile he was to be executed.