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.

The judges evidently knew their man. He went through the form of retreating to Valencia, but he had no intention of hiding his talent under a bushel in the provinces. His next step was astounding in its insolence: he returned to Madrid, and thence eloped with Isabel de Urbina y Cortinas, daughter of a king-at-arms. The police were at once in hot pursuit, but failed to overtake the culprit. He parted from the lady, was married to her by proxy on May 10, 1588, and nineteen days later was out of range on the San Juan, one of the vessels of the Invincible Armada. Lope took part in the famous expedition of the ‘sad Intelligencing Tyrant’ when, as Milton puts it, ‘the very maw of Hell was ransacked, and made to give up her concealed destruction, ere she could vent it in that terrible and damned blast.’ Returning from this disastrous adventure, during which he found time to write the greater part of La Hermosura de AngÉlica, an epic consisting of eleven thousand lines, Lope settled at Valencia, and joined the household of the fifth Duke of Alba. It was the custom of the time for a poor Spanish gentleman, who would have been disgraced by the adoption of a trade or business, to serve as secretary to some rich noble: the duties were various, indefinite and not always dignified, but they involved no social degradation. Lope’s versatile talents were thus utilised in succession by the MarquÉs de Malpica and the MarquÉs de SarriÁ, afterwards Conde de Lemos (the son-in-law of Lerma, and in later years the patron of Cervantes).

His introduction to aristocratic society enlarged Lope’s sphere of observation: it did nothing to improve his morals, which were not naturally austere. During this period he was writing incessantly for the stage, and the Spanish stage was not then a school of asceticism. His wife died about the year 1595, and the last restraint was gone. Lope was straightway entangled in a series of scandalous amours. He was prosecuted for criminal conversation with Antonia Trillo de Armenta in 1596, and in 1597 began a love-affair with Micaela de LujÁn, the Camila Lucinda of his sonnets, and the mother of his brilliant children, Lope FÉlix del Carpio y LujÁn and Marcela, who inherited no small share of her father’s improvising genius. It is impossible to palliate Lope’s misconduct, and the persistent effort to keep it from public knowledge has damaged him more than the attacks of all his enemies; but it is fair to remember that he lived in the most corrupt circles of a corrupt age, that he suffered such temptations as few men undergo, and that he repeatedly strove to extricate himself from the mesh of circumstance.

In 1598 he published his patriotic epic, the Dragontea, as well as a pastoral novel entitled the Arcadia, and in this same year he married Juana de Guardo, daughter of a wealthy but frugal man who had made a fortune by selling pork. Shakespeare was the son of a butcher, but the fact was not thrown in his teeth: Lope was less fortunate, and his second marriage was the subject of a derisive sonnet by GÓngora. So far as can be judged, Lope’s marriage with Juana de Guardo was one of affection, and the reflections cast upon him were absolutely unjust. But the stage had him in its grip, and he could not break with his past, try as he might. He strove without ceasing to make a reputation in other fields of literature: a poem on St. Isidore, the patron-saint of Madrid, the Hermosura de AngÉlica with a mass of supplementary sonnets, the prose romance entitled El Peregrino en su patria, the epic JerusalÉn conquistada written in emulation of Tasso—these diverse works were produced in rapid succession between 1599 and 1609. Meanwhile Lope had been enrolled as a Familiar of the Holy Office, but the vague terror attaching to this sinister post did not prevent an attack being made on his life in 1611. He may have enlisted in the ranks of the Inquisition from mixed motives; yet we cannot doubt that he was passing through a pietistic phase at this time, for between 1609 and 1611 he joined three religious confraternities. This was no blind, no hypocritical attempt to affect a virtue which he had not. He was even too regardless of appearances all his life long.

The death of his son Carlos FÉlix was quickly followed by the death of his wife, and his devotional mood deepened. He now made an irreparable mistake by entering holy orders. No man was less fitted to be a minister of religion, and his private correspondence discloses no sign of a religious spirit, or of anything resembling a religious vocation: on the contrary, it reveals him as frequenting loose company, and cracking unseemly jokes at a most solemn moment. The pendulum had already begun to swing before his ordination, and for some years afterwards he was prominent as an unscrupulous libertine. No one as successful as Lope could fail to make many enemies: he had now delivered himself into their hands, and assuredly they did not spare him. In the Preface to the Second Part of Don Quixote Cervantes, though he does not mention Lope de Vega by name, indulges in an unmistakable allusion to him as a Familiar of the Inquisition notorious for his ‘virtuous occupation.’ Yes! a ‘virtuous occupation’ which was an intolerable public scandal. From 1605 onwards Lope had been on intimate terms with the Duke of Sesa, and his correspondence with the Duke is his condemnation. But his conscience was not dead. Among his letters to Sesa many are stained with tears of shame and of remorse. They reveal him in every mood. He protests against being made the intermediary of the Duke’s vulgar gallantries; he forms resolutions to amend, yet falls, and falls again.

In his fifty-fifth year he conceived an insane passion for Marta de Nevares Santoyo. On the details of this lamentable intrigue nothing need be said here. Once more Samson was in the hands of the Philistines. Led on by GÓngora, they showed him no mercy, but he survived their onset. His plays were acted on every stage in Spain; the people who flocked to the theatre were spell-bound by his dramatic creations, his dexterity, grace and wit; his name was used as a synonym for matchless excellence; and he strengthened his position with the more learned public by a mass of non-dramatic work. He seldom reaches such a height as in the Pastores de BelÉn—a perfect gem of devotion and of art—but the adaptability of his talent is amazing in prose and verse dealing with subjects as diverse as the triumphs of faith in Japan and the fate of Mary Queen of Scots. The short stories in the Filomena and Circe represent him at his weakest, but the Dorotea, a work that had lain by him for many years, is an absorbing fragment of autobiography which exhibits Lope as a master of graceful and colloquial diction.

In one of his agonies of repentance he exclaimed: ‘A curse on all unhallowed love!’ But the punishment of his own transgressions was long delayed. Marta, indeed, died blind and mad; but Lope still had his children, and, with all his faults, he was a fond and devoted father. We may well imagine that none of his own innumerable triumphs thrilled him with a more rapturous delight than the success of his son Lope FÉlix at the poetic jousts in honour of St. Isidore. Strengthened by the domestic happiness which he now enjoyed, Lope underwent a striking change. He wrote more copiously than ever for the stage, but yielded no longer to its temptations; his stormy passions lay behind him—part of a past which all were eager to forget. In 1628 he became chaplain to the congregation of St. Peter, and was a model of pious zeal. It was an astonishing metamorphosis, and there may have been an unconscious histrionic touch in Lope’s rendering of a virtuous rÔle. But the transformation was no mere pose. Lope was too frank to be a Pharisee, and too human to be a saint; but whatever he did, he did with all his might, and he became a hardworking priest, punctual in the discharge of his sacred office. Towards the close he occupied an unexampled pre-eminence. Urban VIII. conferred on him a papal order; though not a favourite at court, he was invited by Olivares to exercise his ingenious fantasy for the entertainment of Philip IV., who was assuming the airs and graces of a patron of the drama. With the crowd Lope’s popularity knew no bounds. Visitors hovered about to catch a glimpse of him as he threaded his way through the streets: his fellow-townsmen gloried in his glory. There is nothing in history comparable to his position.

No man of letters has ever received such visible proofs of his own celebrity, and none has retained it so long. For something like half a century Lope had contrived to fascinate his countrymen, but even he began to grow old at last. Yet the change was not so much in him as in the rising generation.

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

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.

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.

Lope was a sad sinner, but any attempt to represent him as an unamiable man is ridiculous. It is certain that he received large sums of money, and that he died poor: his purse was open to all comers. He lived frugally, loving nothing better than a romp with his children in the garden of his little house in the Calle de Francos. His pleasures and tastes were simple: careless remarks that drop from him reveal him to us. Typical Spaniard as he was, he disliked bull-fights, but he loved angling, and was a most enthusiastic gardener. He had, as he tells us in his pleasant way, half a dozen pictures and a few books; but the only extravagance which he allowed himself was the occasional purchase of flowers rare in Spain. He had a passion for the tulip—at that time a novelty in Europe—and, by dedicating to Manoel Soeiro his Luscinda perseguida (an early play, not printed till 1621), he handsomely expressed his thanks for a present of choice Dutch bulbs. But, even if such positive testimony were wanting, we should confidently guess Lope’s tastes from his poems, redolent of buds and blossoms, of gardens and of glades, of sweet perfumes and subtle aromas. In reading him, we think inevitably of The Flower’s Name: you remember the lines, but I may be allowed to quote them:—

It is very probable that Browning was not deeply read in the masterpieces of Spanish literature, and that he knew comparatively little of Lope; but in these verses we have (as it were) Lope rendered into English: they are Lope all over.

No competent judge questions Lope de Vega’s right to rank as a great poet, but scarcely any great poet—except perhaps Wordsworth—is so unequal. The huge epics upon which he laboured so long, filing and polishing every line, are now forgotten by all but specialists, and (even among these elect) who can pretend that he reads the JerusalÉn conquistada solely for pleasure? On the other hand, no unprejudiced critic denies the beauty of Lope’s best sonnets and lyrics, nor the natural grace of his prose in the Dorotea, and in his unguarded correspondence. Had he written nothing else, he would be considered a charming poet, and wonderfully versatile man of letters. But these performances; astonishing as they are, may be regarded as the mere diversions of exuberant genius.

It is, of course, to his dramatic works that Lope de Vega owes his splendid pre-eminence in the history of literature. He was much more than a great dramatist: in a very real sense he was the founder of the national theatre in Spain. It cannot be denied that he had innumerable predecessors—men who employed the dramatic form with more or less skill; and he himself joined with Cervantes in acclaiming the metal-beater Lope de Rueda as the patriarch of the Spanish stage. But even the joint and several authority of Cervantes and Lope do not suffice in questions of literary history. No doubt Lope de Rueda is a figure of historical importance, and no doubt his actual achievement is considerable in its way. There is, however, nothing that can be called ‘national’ in Rueda’s formal plays, which are mostly adaptations from the Italian, and the bluff hilarity of his clever interludes is primitive. The later practitioners in the Senecan drama are of less significance than Miguel SÁnchez and than Juan de la Cueva, both of whom foreshadow the new developments which Lope de Vega was to introduce. So far as the drama is concerned Miguel SÁnchez is represented to posterity by two plays only, and it is therefore difficult to estimate the extent of his influence on the Spanish drama. Cueva’s innovating tendency is manifest in his choice of themes and his treatment of them: he strikes out a new line by selecting a representative historic subject, develops it regardless of the unities, and occasionally strikes the note of modernity by approximating to the comedy of manners—the cloak-and-sword play. Withal, Cueva is more remarkable as an intrepid explorer than as a finished craftsman, and he inevitably has the uncertain touch of an early experimenter.Lope de Vega is on a higher plane as an executant, and is moreover a great original inventor. In its final form the Spanish theatre is his work, and whatever he may once have said of Lope de Rueda, he finally claimed the honour which undoubtedly belongs to him. Anticipating Tennyson, he pointedly remarks in the Égloga Á Claudio that

The passage is well worth quoting. ‘Though I have departed from the rigidity of Terence, and though I am far from questioning the credit due to the three or four great geniuses who have guarded the infancy of the drama, yet to me’—he proudly continues—‘to me the art of the comedia owes its beginnings. To whom, Claudio, do we owe so many pictures of love and jealousy, so many stirring passages of eloquence, so copious a supply of all the figures within the power of rhetoric to invent? The mass of to-day’s productions is mere imitation of what art created yesterday. I it was who first struck the path and made it practicable so that all now use it easily. I it was who set the example now followed and copied in every direction. ‘I it was who first struck the path—I it was who first set the example.’ It is a daring thing to say, but it can be maintained.

One of the chief difficulties in dealing with Lope, or in persuading others to deal with him, is his prodigious copiousness. But it is not insuperable. For our immediate purpose we may neglect his non-dramatic writings—in every sense a great load taken off, for they alone fill twenty-one quarto volumes. There remain his plays, and their number is astounding. We shall never know precisely how many plays Lope wrote, for only a small part of what was acted has survived, and his own statements are not altogether clear. Roughly speaking, he seems to have written 220 plays up to the end of 1603, and from this date we can follow him as he gallops along: the total rises to 483 in 1609, 800 in 1618, 900 in 1620, 1070 in 1625, and 1500 in 1632. Four years afterwards PÉrez de MontalbÁn published a volume of eulogies on the master by various hands—something like Jonsonus Virbius, to which Ford, Waller and others contributed posthumous panegyrics on Ben Jonson in 1638; and in this Fama PÓstuma PÉrez de MontalbÁn asserts that Lope wrote 1800 plays and more than 400 autos and entremeses. Consider a moment what these figures mean: they mean that Lope never wrote less than thirty-four plays a year, that he usually wrote fifty, that the yearly average rose to sixty as he grew older, and that in the last three years of his life it increased to over a hundred—say, two plays a week. Devout persons are sometimes prone to exaggerate the number of miracles performed by their favourite saint, and, if PÉrez de MontalbÁn’s statements were not corroborated by Lope, we might be inclined to suspect him of some such form of pious fraud. As it is, we have no ground for thinking that PÉrez de MontalbÁn was guilty of any deliberate exaggeration: most probably he set down what he heard from Lope, as well as he remembered it. But perhaps Lope’s calculations were wrong. If anything like 1800 of Lope’s plays survived, nobody would have the courage to attack them. Most have perished, and we must judge Lope by the comparatively few that have escaped destruction—431 plays and 50 autos.

This may seem very much as though we were shown a few stones from the Coliseum, and invited on the strength of them to form an idea of Rome. It is no doubt but too likely that among the 1369 lost plays there may have been some real masterpieces (in literature the best does not always survive); but it is inconceivable that only the failures have been saved, and, as the collected pieces range from a play written when Lope was twelve to another written shortly before his death, we have the privilege of observing every phase of his stupendous exploit. That is to say: we may have the privilege if we have the leisure. The student who sits down to the paltry remnant that has reached us will, if he reads Lope de Vega’s plays without interruption for seven hours a day, be over six months before he reaches the end of his delightful task. I say it in all seriousness—a delightful task—but it would be idle to pretend that there are no tracts of barren ground. A large proportion of Lope’s dramatic work is brilliant improvisation, and is not of stuff that endures; but there are veins of pure ore in his dross, and in moments of inspiration he ranks with the greatest dramatists in the world.

He has himself endeavoured to state his dramatic theory in the Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo, and the contrast with his practice is amusing. He opens with a profession of faith in Aristotle’s rules, of which he knew nothing beyond what he could gather from the pedantic schoolmen of the Renaissance, but goes on to confess that he disregards these sacred precepts because the public which pays cares nothing for them, and must be addressed in the foolish fashion that its folly demands. The only approach to a dramatic principle in the Arte nuevo is a matter-of-course approval of unity of action, the necessity of which has never been doubted by any playwright who knew his business. The rest of the unities go by the board, and the aspiring dramatist is solemnly exhorted to invent a clever plot, to maintain the interest steadily throughout, and to postpone the climax as long as possible so as to humour the public which loves to be kept on tenterhooks till the last moment. ‘Invent a clever plot and maintain the interest steadily throughout’—it is easily said, but how to do it? Lope proceeds to give his views as to the metres most appropriate for certain situations and emotions: laments are best expressed in dÉcimas, the sonnet suits suspense, the romance (or, still better, the octave) is the vehicle of narrative, tercets are to be used in weighty passages, and redondillas in love-scenes. And Lope ends by admitting that only six of the 483 plays which he had composed up to 1609 were in accordance with the rules of art.

How familiar it sounds—this wailing over ‘the rules of art’! Just so Ben Jonson lamented that Shakespeare ‘wanted art’—that is, he paid no heed to the pseudo-Aristotelian precepts concerning dramatic composition. Nor did Lope: and it is precisely by neglecting to follow blind leaders of the blind, and by giving free play to their individual genius that Shakespeare and Lope de Vega have become immortal. Rules may serve for men of simple talent; but an original mind attains independence by intelligently breaking them, and thus arrives at inventing a new and living form of art. It is in this sense that we call Lope the founder of the Spanish theatre. His transforming touch is magical. Invested with the splendour of his imagination, the merest shred of fact, as in La Estrella de Sevilla, is converted into a romantic drama, living, natural, real, arresting as an experience suffered by oneself. And, with all Lope’s rapidity of workmanship, his finest effects are not the result of rare and happy accident: they are deliberately and delicately calculated. We know from the testimony of Ricardo de Turia in the Norte de la poesÍa espaÑola that Lope was an assiduous frequenter of the theatre; that, long after his reputation was established, he would sit absorbed, listening to whatever play was being given; and that he took careful note of every successful scene or situation. He was never above learning from others; but they could teach him little: he was the master of them all.

It is frequently alleged against him that his copiousness was an artistic blunder, and that he would have acted more wisely in the interest of his fame, if he had concentrated his magnificent powers on a smaller number of plays, and perfected them. In other words, he would have done more, if he had done less. This may be true; Virgil wrote ten lines a day, and they endure for ever: Lope wrote three thousand lines a day, and most of them have perished. But we must take genius as we find it, and be thankful to accept it on its own conditions. It is far from clear to me that Lope chose unwisely. He had not only a reputation to make, but a mission to fulfil. For the work that he was born to do—the creation of a national theatre—copiousness was an essential need. Continuous production, as Chorley puts it, is a vital requisite to ‘the existence of the drama in its true form, as acted poetry.’ This, however, is beyond the power of a few normal men of genius. Schiller and Goethe combined failed to create a national theatre at Weimar: no one but Lope could have succeeded in creating a national theatre at Madrid. At precisely the right moment Spain happily produced a most abnormal writer who could throw off admirable plays—many of them imperfect, but many of them masterpieces—in such profusion as twenty ordinary men of genius could not equal. LuzÁn declares that Lope so accustomed the Spanish public to constant novelty that no piece could be repeated after two performances. This is not quite exact. But assuming it to be true, you may say that Lope spoilt the public, as well as his own work. Well, that is as it may be: in our time, at all events, the plays that run for a thousand nights are not always the best.Lope was equal to the demand made by exacting audiences, and he remained equal to it for an unexampled length of time. The most hostile critic must grant that Lope was the greatest inventor in the history of the drama. And he excelled in every kind. In tragedy he has given us such works as Las Paces de los Reyes and La Fianza satisfecha, and he would doubtless have given more had not the public rebelled against a too mournful presentation of life. Chorley, whom it is impossible to avoid quoting when Lope is under discussion, points to the significant fact that so great a tragedy as La Estrella de Sevilla is not included among Lope’s dramatic works, nor in the two great miscellaneous collections of Spanish plays—the Escogidas and Diferentes, as they are called. It exists only as a suelta. Great in tragedy, Lope is greater—or, at least, is more frequently great—in contemporary comedy, in the realisation of character: El perro del hortelano, La batalla del honor, Los melindres de Belisa, Las flores de Don Juan and La Esclava de su galÁn are there to prove it. There are obvious flaws in Lope’s pieces, but we can never feel quite sure that the flaws which irritate us most are not interpolations. He seems to have revised only the twelve volumes of his plays (Parts IX.-XX.) published between 1617 and 1625 inclusive, and two posthumous volumes; a large proportion of his work is so mishandled in the pirated editions that, as he avers, one line from his pen is smothered by a hundred lines from the pen of some unscrupulous actor or needy theatrical hanger-on.

The marvel is that such bungling has not been able to destroy the beauty of his conception altogether. Dramatic conception, and the faculty of distilling from no far-fetched situation all that it contains, are Lope’s distinctive qualities. He is less successful in maintaining a constant level of verbal charm; he can caress the ear with an exquisite rhythmical cadence, but he hears the impresario calling, sets spurs to Pegasus, and stumbles. The Nemesis of haste pursues him, and, as has often been remarked, some of his last acts are weak. La batalla del honor is a case in point: a splendid play spoiled by a weak ending. But this undeniable defect is not peculiar to Lope de Vega: it is noticeable in Julius CÆsar, the last act of which reveals Shakespeare pressed for time, and tacking his scenes rapidly together so as to put the play punctually in rehearsal. Let us be honest, and use the same scales and weights for every one: we shall find the greatest works by the greatest men frequently come short of absolute perfection at some point. Lope fails with the rest, and, if he fails oftener, that is because he writes more. Is it surprising that he should sometimes feel the strain upon him? He had not only to invent plots by the score, and create character by the hundred: he had also to satisfy a vigilant and fastidious public by the variety of his metrical craftsmanship, and in this respect he has neither equal nor second.

We must accept Lope as Heaven made him with his inevitable imperfections and his incomparable endowment. He has the Spanish desire to shine, to be conspicuous, to please, and he condescends to please at almost any cost. Yet he has an artistic conscience of his own, endangers his supremacy by flouting the tribe of cultos, and pours equal scorn on the pageant-plays—the comedias del vulgo which were so soon to become the fashion in court-circles. Lope needed no scene-painters to make good his deficiencies. In Ay verdades que en amor, he laughs at the pieces

And well he might, for his alert presentation would convert a barn into a palace. In the comedia which he invented—using comedia in much the same sense as Dante uses commedia—his scope is unlimited: he stages all ranks of human society from kings to rustic clowns, and is by turns tragic, serious, diverting, pathetic, or gay. He has the unique power of creating the daintiest heroines in the world—beautiful, appealing, tender and brave. He has the secret of communicating emotion, of inventing dialogue, always appropriate, and he is ever prompt to enliven it with a delicate humour, humane and debonair. He has not merely enriched Spain: in some degree not yet precisely known—for the history of comparative literature is in its infancy—he has contributed to almost every theatre in Europe.

Two or three illustrations must suffice. Rotrou, as the handbooks tell us, has borrowed four—perhaps five—plays from Lope: we may now say five and perhaps six, for in CosroÈs Lope’s Las Mudanzas de la fortuna y sucesos de don BeltrÁn de AragÓn is combined with a Latin play by Louis Cellot. Every one remembers that Corneille borrowed Don Sanche d’Aragon and the Suite du Menteur from Lope. There are traces of Lope in MoliÈre: in Les Femmes savantes, in L’École des maris, in L’École des Femmes, in Le MÉdecin malgrÉ lui—and perhaps in Tartufe. And, even in the present incomplete state of our knowledge, it would be possible to draw up a long list of foreign debtors from Boisrobert and D’Ouville to Lesage. Of Lope’s Spanish imitators this is not the time to speak. He did not found a school, but every Spanish dramatist of the best period marches under Lope’s flag. There are still some who, in a spirit of chicane, would withhold from him the glory of being the architect of the Spanish theatre. So be it: but even they acknowledge that he found it brick, and left it marble.