“In the first act lay the foundation; in the second let the complications commence, and contrive in such a way that until half through the third act no one can foresee the end. Always deceive the curiosity of the spectator by showing him, as though possible, a result entirely different from that to which the incidents seem to point.
“Let the versification be tastefully appropriate to the subject you treat. Decasyllabic lines suit lamentations; the sonnet is well placed in a monologue; descriptions demand the romantic stanza, although they are as brilliant as possible in octosyllabic metre. Triple-rhymed lines are reserved for grave affairs, and the redondillas[[165]] for lovers’ conversations.”
The sound sense of this little essay shows how thoroughly De Vega understood his subject. Writing to please the populace, not the learned and possibly hyper-critical, he had studied the playgoer and knew all his peculiarities—how to please him and how to take liberties with impunity. His comedies of Cloak and Sword are the least careless and the most admirable of his plays, and they were the most successful. The involved and complicated plots, the duels and disguises, the hurry and the vigor of this class of plays are seen to best advantage in Lope de Vega’s works. He had founded the school, and the bent of his genius fitted him to be its master. His works and those of his scholars went at once to all parts of Europe. In England Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Centlivre, Farquhar, Congreve, Wycherly, Holcroft, were his followers, copyists, plagiarists. Not only did others pillage him, but, like almost all prolific authors, he plagiarized from himself. Over thirty or forty times has he treated one subject: a lady and a knight forced to leave the court in disguise because of the persecutions of the king, and taking refuge in a village, where, after many mishaps and adventures, they are finally married. Of course in each of these twoscore plays the situations vary, but the central idea is the same in all. To an author of such facility the great difficulty was in the discovery of a subject. That was all he needed; its dramatic dressing was an easy task. Hardly one of the picturesque points of Spanish history did he neglect. His lighter plays were often historical. Generally they were not. His Perro del Hortelano (“Dog in the Manger”) is, for instance, an original invention. It contains a delightful sketch of a woman absorbed by jealousy, and yet unable to make up her mind to marry the loved one because of his inferior birth. Both lovers are drawn with delicious vigor—a vigor suggesting, perhaps remotely, Thackeray. This charming comedy shows of what things Lope was capable in this line had he so willed. It is somewhat in the style of Scribe at his best. Indeed, in many respects he was the precursor of Scribe, who greatly resembled him in fecundity, facility, and felicity of execution. More than one of his plays, if modernized, might pass for the work of the brilliant French dramatist.
But the best of Lope’s work is many degrees above the best of Scribe’s. In ingenuity and in originality, and in the conduct of the business of the stage, the Spaniard is at least the equal of the Frenchman, while in the depicting of passion he is by far the superior. Scribe was incapable of anything at all approaching the sombre and inevitable conclusion of the Star of Seville, appalling with the inexorable logic of fate. Mrs. Frances Anne Kemble has produced a spirited English play suggested by it, of which Lord Holland has given a long analysis with translated extracts. As he justly remarks, no mere relation of the plots of Lope’s plays would give a sufficient idea of the attractions they possess, “nor can they be collected from a mere perusal of detached passages. The chief merit of his plays is a certain spirit and animation which pervades the whole, but which is not to be preserved in disjointed limbs of the composition.”
It is easy to find the reason for Lope de Vega’s theatrical activity. He was poor, and play-writing was profitable. He says somewhere that poverty and himself formed a copartnership to work for the stage. At the close of the sixteenth century Spain was divided into several almost independent provinces, and there was no interprovincial copyright; the bookseller of Castile could reprint and sell for his own profit the successful work first published in Leon. An author in those days could not even get pay for advance-sheets. Under these circumstances publishers naturally paid authors little or nothing. Literature was a labor of love. The dramatic taste, however, of the Spanish people was increasing. The two companies of actors gradually grew to forty, and the forty audiences asked for novelty. The managers endeavoring to satisfy this demand, the consumption of comedies was something enormous. There was a uniform price fixed in advance: a comedy was worth five hundred reals, equivalent to about forty or fifty dollars of our money. The reward was not great, but the labor was light—at least to Lope. Dramatic work paid; other literature did not. Lope would have been certainly justified in devoting himself exclusively to the drama. He might labor in other fields; on the stage he ruled. What is done quickly may die quickly, and few of Lope’s plays hold the stage to-day even in Spain. But if his plays are not seen, his influence is visible in the drama of France, of England, of Germany, and of Spain, his own country, of the literature of which he and Calderon and Cervantes are the greatest glories. Calderon was his follower and Cervantes was his friend. Although it has been said they were at enmity, it is known that Lope de Vega praised Cervantes, and the author of Don Quixote generously eulogized his more successful rival thus: “At last appeared that prodigy of nature, the great Lope de Vega, and established his monarchy on the stage. He conquered and reduced under his jurisdiction every actor and author in the kingdom.... And though there have been many who have attempted the same career, all their works together would not equal in quantity what this single man has composed.”
And Cervantes wrote these lines almost twenty years before Lope de Vega’s death, almost twenty years before he had ceased composing. It is with the following brilliant paragraph that Mr. Ticknor, always strongly prejudiced in favor of Cervantes, begins his historical criticism of Lope’s life and labor, and with it we end: “It is impossible to speak of Cervantes as the great genius of the Spanish nation without recalling Lope de Vega, the rival who far surpassed him in contemporary popularity, and rose, during the lifetime of both, to a degree of fame which no Spaniard had yet attained, and which has since been reached by few of any country.”
ENGLISH TORIES AND CATHOLIC EDUCATION IN IRELAND.
The motives which impel men to their best actions are not always, perhaps they are not generally, the best possible motives. It is not improbable that more men are driven to the tribunal of penance by attrition than are led thither by contrition. If this be true of men in their individual and private affairs, it is still more strikingly true of politicians and statesmen in their public acts. He would indeed be fanciful and credulous who should imagine that Mr. Gladstone, in framing, advocating, and insisting upon the passage of his bill for the disestablishment and disendowment of the Protestant Church in Ireland, was inspired by a pure love of abstract justice and right, and a disinterested desire to relieve the Irish people from a flagrantly unjust burden and a crying wrong. He saw as clearly as any one that this wrong existed, but he perceived also that by removing it he would win popular support for himself and his party. It is tolerably safe to say that had Mr. Gladstone imagined that the passage of the bill for the disestablishment of the church would have resulted in the expulsion of himself and his party from power, he would not have urged the measure. In this case there were two motives: one positively and abstractly good, the other good in the estimation of those who believed that the continuance of power in the hands of the Liberal party was desirable. The latter incentive was the ruling one. Mr. Gladstone, we believe, would not have advocated a measure which he knew to be bad, although this advocacy might have secured him an extension of power. Nor would he have insisted upon the adoption of a measure which he knew to be good had he known that this insistence would deprive him of power. But he saw that while the disestablishment and disendowment of the alien church in Ireland would be an act of justice in itself, it would also be a good political stroke, tending to strengthen his own position and to give a longer lease of power to his party.
One need not trouble himself to assign higher motives than these to the Tory government, which, to the surprise and delight of the Catholics in Ireland, has brought forward a really fair scheme for intermediate education in Ireland, and seems honestly disposed to carry it at the present session of Parliament. Just as we write the bill has passed the House of Lords, and is about to be brought up for final passage in the Commons. The queen’s speech at the opening of Parliament contained a promise that a bill for the promotion of intermediate education in Ireland should be introduced; but it was not until events made probable the speedy dissolution of Parliament and a general election that this promise was redeemed. It is not uncharitable to suppose that the government felt it necessary to have something to offer to Ireland in the event of an appeal to the constituencies under circumstances that would make every vote important. The bill passed its second reading in the House of Lords on the 28th of June—a moment when it was still possible that England might soon find herself embroiled in a foreign war, and when it was given out in governmental circles that Parliament was to be dissolved and a general election ordered. The third reading and final passage of the bill in the Lords took place some two weeks afterwards. Meanwhile the position of affairs had somewhat altered: the conclusion of the labors of the Congress of Berlin and the disclosure of the Treaty of Constantinople had greatly strengthened the hands of the government; the Opposition gave evidence of demoralization and discord in its own ranks, and toward the close of July the inspired journals announced that Parliament would not be dissolved this year, inasmuch as the general approval of the course of the government was too plain to be misunderstood or denied. The Irish Education Bill came up for its second reading in the House of Commons under these circumstances, and its friends fancied that they discovered a little less earnestness on the part of the government in pushing it forward than was displayed under the more critical circumstances in the House of Lords. Still, the probabilities are that the bill will pass and receive the royal assent before the close of the present session; and if this be so, the Tory government of Earl Beaconsfield will go down to posterity as the first administration which has had the courage, the wisdom, and the good-will to award to Ireland anything like justice in the matter of education.
The bill provides for a system of payments by results, and practically is identical with the system which Mr. Isaac Butt laid before the writer during a conversation in London four years ago. We are unaware whether the Lord Chancellor, Lord Cairns—who is, like Mr. Butt, a Protestant, an Irishman, and a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin—has availed himself of Mr. Butt’s ideas in the preparation of the measure; but this is not at all improbable. Mr. Butt has expressed his cordial approval of the measure. To what extent the Tory government may have been able to inspire such organs of public opinion as the Saturday Review, and such writers as Matthew Arnold in the Fortnightly, we cannot say; but the fact is that for the first time in its existence the Saturday Review has recognized and defended the right of Irish Catholics to be educated in the way that they considered proper, and that Mr. Arnold seems suddenly to have arrived at the conclusion that the denial of a Catholic university in Ireland is a wicked, absurd, and mischievous freak of English Puritanism. The development of opinion in the Saturday Review is startlingly rapid. In a remarkable article written before the introduction of Lord Cairns’ bill the Review said that “the injustice of refusing either to give the Irish Roman Catholics a university or to allow them to set up one for themselves is so patent that if the demand for a charter were once more put forward it could scarcely be very long resisted.” But in the same pages it warned the Irish Catholics that they must not expect to receive anything like an endowment from the state for denominational education: