The swelling tide of culteranismo was invading the stage; the fatal protection of Philip IV. was beginning to undermine the national theatre. Lope had always opposed the new fashion of preciosity, and he could not, or would not, supply the demand at court for a spectacular drama. One could scarcely expect him to help in demolishing the work of his lifetime. In his youth, and even in middle age, he looked down upon his plays as being almost outside the pale of literature. He lived long enough to revise his opinion, though perhaps to the last he would have refused to admit that his plays were worth all his epics put together. He lived long enough to revise his opinion, and a little too long for his happiness. His latest plays did not hit the public taste: his successor was already hailed in the person of the courtly Calderón whom he himself had first praised. To his artistic mortifications were added poignant domestic sorrows. He had dissuaded his son, Lope Félix, from adopting literature as a profession: the youth joined the navy, went on a cruise to South America, and was there
summoned to the deep.
He, he and all his mates, to keep
An incommunicable sleep.
The drowning of his son in 1634 was a grievous blow to Lope, but a more cruel stroke awaited him. The flight of his favourite daughter, Antonia Clara, from her home filled him with an unspeakable despair. He could endure no more. With the simple, confiding faith that never left him, he believed that his sins had brought upon him the vengeance of heaven, and he sought to make tardy atonement by the severest penance, lashing himself till the walls of his room were flecked with blood. But the end was at hand. On August 23, 1635, Lope wrote his last two poems, fell ill, and on August 27 his soul was required of him.
The extravagant and erring spirit hies
To his confine.
Headed by the Duke of Sesa, the vast funeral procession turned aside so as to pass before the convent of the Barefooted Trinitarians where Lope’s gifted daughter Marcela had taken the vows in 1621. From the cloister window the nun watched the multitude on its way to the Church of St. Sebastian in the Calle de Atocha; there, to the mournful music of the Dies irae, Lope was interred beneath the high altar. His eloquent lips were silent; his untiring hand and his unquiet heart were still: his passionate pilgrimage was over. It might have been thought that all that was mortal of him was at peace for ever, and that the final resting-place of one so famous could not be forgotten. But, as if to show that all is vanity, it was otherwise decreed by the mocking fates. Early in the nineteenth century it became necessary to remove Lope’s coffin from the vault in which it lay, and no care was taken to ensure its subsequent identification. Hence he, whose renown once filled the world, now sleeps unrecognised amid the humble and the obscure.
It has been granted us to know Lope de Vega better than we know most of our contemporaries. He lived in the merciless light of publicity; his slightest slip was noted by vigilant eyes and rancorous pens; and he has himself recorded the weaknesses which any other man would have studiously concealed. Yet, gross as were his sins, his individual charm is irresistible. Ruiz de Alarcón taxed him with being envious, and from the huge mass of his confidential correspondence, a few detached phrases are picked out to support this charge. None of us is as frank as Lope; yet it seems highly probable that, if a selection were made from the private letters written in this city to-day and this selection were published in the newspapers to-morrow, a certain number of personal difficulties might follow. But let us test Ruiz de Alarcón’s charge. Of whom should Lope be envious? Not of Ruiz de Alarcón himself, undoubtedly a remarkable dramatist, but never popular as Lope was. Not of Tirso de Molina, another great dramatist, but a personal friend of Lope’s. Not of Cervantes, who had abandoned the stage long before he succeeded so greatly in romance. Not of Góngora, of whose poetic principles Lope disapproved, but to whom he paid sedulous court. Not of Calderón, who was nearly forty years younger than himself, and whom he first presented to the public. The accusation has no more solid base than a few choleric words dropped in haste.
The truth is that Lope is open to precisely the opposite charge of culpable complaisance. His genius, like that of Cervantes, was creative, not critical; his praise is fulsome, indiscriminating, and therefore ineffective. He was a most loyal friend, and to him all his geese are swans. His Laurel de Apolo is an exercise in adulation of no more critical value than Cervantes’s Canto de Calíope. Famous writers, once in port, are inclined to ‘nurse’ their fame by conciliating their rivals. Lope’s constant successes provided him with so many foes that it would have been folly to increase their number by attacking rising men. Like most other contemporaries he detested Ruiz de Alarcón; but Ruiz de Alarcón could take very good care of himself in a wrangle, and perhaps a man is not universally detested without some good reason. Apart from any question of tactics, Lope was naturally generous. There is a credible story that he dashed off the Orfeo to launch Pérez de Montalbán, who published it under his own name, and thus started on a prosperous, feverish career.