mistakes, and accidents of one kind or another; and the best dramatist, so Lope says in so many words, was he who made his entanglement look most hopeless, led his audience most astray as to his way of getting out of it, and kept them longest in suspense. Lope's dramatic art, in point of fact, was, if distantly yet distinctly, akin to that of the street acrobat whose pièce de résistance is being tied up for the rope-trick. Other attractions there were, no doubt. If anything could make it a pleasure to listen to diffuse declamation, it would be Lope's easy flowing verse, and his fertility of invention in incidents and situations would give life even to a stage peopled with puppets. But the attraction that was relied upon was the dramatic riddle that kept the audience on tenter-hooks from first to last, and so ministered to the craving for excitement that has been at all times strong in the Spanish people. The adoration which Lope received from his contemporaries was only their very natural expression of gratitude to the man who had proved himself the unfailing provider of a stimulant which was to them almost one of the necessaries of life; but it would be against all reason to look for a like enthusiasm in those to whom his drama offers no such quid pro quo.

This is what lies at the root of the more moderate estimate of Lope de Vega adopted by posterity. The unmanageable bulk of his dramatic works must be held accountable for the want of a formal recognition of his place in Spanish literature and as founder of a national Spanish theatre. Hartzenbusch, apologizing for a selection (about a fourth) in the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, points out that to print all the accessible plays he would have required 14 (more likely 15 or 16) volumes, and that, if all Lope wrote could be recovered, 50 would be insufficient. The volumes, it may be observed, are royal 8vo, with an average of 600 pages, and for the drama are closely printed in triple columns and in type rather too small for comfort. Lope's biographer Montalvo credits him with having written 1800 plays and 400 autos, but be wrote comparatively few after 1632, and in that year both he himself and also Montalvo give the number of his plays as 1500. Prodigious as even this estimate may seem, there is no reason to believe that it is materially

exaggerated.

It was this enormous productivity that invested him with something like superhuman powers in the eyes of the populace; but the wonder with which the faculty fills us should not blind us as to the value of its results. Numbers in this case are no proof of wealth. They are like the vast sums set down in old Spanish histories which stagger the reader until

he

he perceives that they mean maravedis. Plays there were of Lope's that were repeated as many as seventy times, but a play that depended upon a surprise for its interest could not, as a rule, in the nature of things enjoy a long run. No audiences would go on day after day winking at a secret everybody knew, or waiting to be startled by a stale revelation. There are limits to the docility of the habitual playgoer. The very principle on which Lope's plays were constructed involved a constant succession of fresh plays to replace such as had lost their savour, and these necessarily remained in manuscript, for neither author nor proprietor had any interest in publishing them, and they offered no temptation to the enterprising booksellers who printed unauthorized copies for the use of the playgoers. Hence the discrepancy between the estimated number of Lope's plays and the number identified; about three-fifths seem to have disappeared without leaving even their titles on record. Lope himself said three years before his death that, though too many had been printed, they were few compared with the others. His extant dramatic works, including autos, interludes, and eclogues, cannot very much exceed 500, of which the full-length plays make about 440. Of these 290 are printed in the volumes of Comedias de Lope de Vega,' thirteen of which, out of twentyfive, had the benefit of his own supervision. Not that he had anything to do with the selection or publication; the plays, we learn, were printed without his consent, and he was merely allowed as a favour to correct and restore them as far as possible to the shape in which he wrote them. The others are scattered through collections of plays by different authors, or in manuscript, or printed separately on grey paper with blunt type' in the shabby sheets dear to the collector.

6

These are the main materials available, but we may be sure that the Spanish Royal Academy and its editor, Don Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo, will not rest satisfied with the work of their predecessors, and will leave unturned no stone under which a piece of Lope's work may lie buried. Most likely we have already the full tale of his miscellaneous works, but there may be gleanings of overlooked dramas even after Chorley and Barrera. Of the 900 or more unnamed and unknown, many a one is probably hidden away among family archives far less promising than the Ossuna MSS., and even a printed play or two, unrecorded as yet, might possibly be found, as plays have been before now, lurking on some back shelf in theological company. The plays that have been printed are in all probability his best; print in this case is a proof of natural selection; but it by no means follows that a play that was not

among

among the prime favourites of Lope's generation might not have as great an interest for modern scholars as the Estrella de Sevilla' or the 'Perro del Hortelano.'

The Life of Lope de Vega in the first volume was written, it appears, in 1864 by Don Cayetano Alberto de la Barrera, the author of the Catalogo bibliografico y biografico del Antiguo Teatro Español,' a work which has now taken a place beside the late Count Schack's great 'History of the Spanish Drama.' The editors call it a nueva biografía; but the adjective might as well have been left out, for it cannot be said that any Life of Lope de Vega has been hitherto written. Lord Holland's scholarly book, it is true, bears the title, and there are memoirs in abundance: Montalvan's in memoriam tribute, Baena's in 'Hijos de Madrid,' Schack's, Ticknor's, Quintana's, Sismondi's, Lafond's, but none that pretends to be much more than a passing notice, or short summary of facts mainly from Montalvan. The trail of Montalvan, it would seem, is over them all; and unfortunately his account is, if a man should speak truly, little better than a tissue of absurdities. He certainly had opportunities for being Lope's Boswell. His father, Alonso Perez, bookseller to the king, was an old friend of Lope's, and Montalvan (the name, Quevedo intimates, was an aristocratic assumption of the son's) was a kind of Mercury in the Lope solar system, the smallest of the chief satellites, but much greater than any of the asteroids, and the closest of all to the Sun and the most sensitive to his influence. That Lope had a very great regard for him and a high opinion of his abilities is clear, but an elderly ascetic would hardly have been very communicative about his early life to a young man forty years his junior. Nor, indeed, is there anything in Montalvan's narrative that he might not have had just as well from any old friend of Lope's as from Lope himself, and such a source is the more likely as what he undertook to write was not a deliberate biography, but merely a few introductory pages to the Fama Posthuma,' a collection of eulogies by different hands on the occasion of the poet's death.

It is not so much the matter as the treatment that is defective. If Montalvan had shaken up his facts in a bag and drawn them for use at haphazard, he could scarcely have made a greater jumble of the story; but what it wants in consistency it makes up in ornament, for he was fond of garnishing his prose with culto flowers. Eulogy, not biography, was his business, and this may serve as his excuse for silence on all matters affecting the reputation of his old friend. His intimacy with Lope, however, seems to have been generally accepted as a guarantee for

the

the accuracy of all his statements, though Lord Holland, Schack, and Ticknor, it is true, found them perplexing at times. Lope himself, in the 'Arcadia' and in his poetical epistles, sometimes helps to correct Montalvan's random chronology. But he just as often mystifies his readers by his way of calling spades 'iron wakeners of the sleepy soil,' or of using some equally elegant circumlocution: for though Lope could ridicule the affectations of the culto poets almost as bitterly as their arch-enemy Quevedo, he often sinned against common sense as outrageously as any of them. Among the best of his light sonnets and they are among the best things he wrote-is one in the culto jargon, in which he asks Fabio if he understands what he is saying, and when Fabio says he does, tells him he lies, for he does not understand it himself; and another in which Boscan and Garcilaso, returning to Spain from the other world and seeking admission at an inn, are answered in a language so strange that they conclude that they have lost their way, or at best have only got as far as the Basque Provinces. But these burlesques might be matched out of his own serious writings, even out of familiar letters to friends, when, as Dogberry would say, there is no need of such vanity. His devices, for instance, when he has to speak of years, are remarkable; he turns them into lustres, or the times that Sol has travelled the space between Aries and Piscesanything to escape the vulgarity of años, a low word used by boors haggling over a donkey or a bullock at a fair. The first stumbling-point in the story of his life is in fact partly due to this weakness. In some verses to a friend he speaks of having, in the three first lustres of his life, drawn his sword against the brave Portuguese at Terceira. As he was born in November 1562, this would have been, at the latest, in 1577, and therefore an impossibility, unless he landed at Terceira on a filibustering expedition. Schack attempts an answer to the riddle, but Ticknor gives it up; neither of them seems to have thought of Scott's way of accounting for the old lady's ghost-story. 'Aiblins,' suggested Scott, 'your grand mither micht have been a leear.' It would be harsh to say that Lope was a liar, but it is not too much to say that he had no great regard for truth. Very likely a long apprenticeship to the popular drama, and catering for people who did not care a maravedi for the veracities so long as they were amused and excited, made it a second nature to him to aim at effect first of all in all things.

In the foregoing case truth demanded four lustres, for there was no possible opportunity for fighting the Portuguese at Terceira before 1582. Of course it is to the expeditions

under

under the Marquis of Santa Cruz, whom he so often glorified, that he refers there is no reason for doubting that he served in the campaign, and that it was then he met Cervantes, and made the impression which led to the prediction of his greatness a few months afterwards in the 'Galatea.' But unfortunately quatro lustros would not scan, and for poetry to descend to the style of a parish register was not to be thought of, so Lope struck five years off his age, and thus settled the matter. Probably, however, he would have done the same in any case; for, whether it is a mere vanity, or a dramatic fancy for posing as an interesting youth, he almost invariably makes himself out younger than he really was. For instance, he describes himself in four or five places as a mere boy, a stripling with the first down on his lip, when he joined the Armada in his twenty-sixth year; he calls the Dragontea' a work of his tender age, though he was in his thirty-fifth when he wrote it; he was in his twenty-seventh when he entered the Duke of Alva's service, and he calls that the green spring-time of his blooming years. In short, when he spoke of himself, he had no more scruple about striking off from five to ten years than one of the old pre-conscientious landscape-painters had about putting in a non-existent tree or geologically impossible rock where Nature's sense of the picturesque had left him without a properly balanced foreground.

This propensity of Lope's should always be remembered when any autobiographical work, the Dorotea' for example, is under consideration. That the 'Dorotea' is pro tanto an autobiography does not, of course, admit of a doubt; the only real question is, how far the minor incidents had counterparts in his life in almost all essentials the story agrees with known facts. It was written, he says, before he sailed in the Armada, and lost during his absence; but he afterwards recovered it, corrected it, pruned away its youthful exuberance and printed it with additions in 1632. He evidently bestowed great care upon it. Of all his works, he says, it was the one he loved best, and it certainly is in some respects the most remarkable of all. Probably in its first shape it was modelled on the Celestina,' which it resembles somewhat in its prose, the best that Lope ever wrote, but in revising it in his old age he could hardly help infusing into it something of his manner as a writer for the stage.

By a strange misnomer the 'Dorotea' is sometimes spoken of as a pastoral, a species of fiction to which it bears about as much affinity as Humphrey Clinker' to 'The Pilgrim's Progress.' Lope himself called it an accion en prosa, a dramatic story in prose, as if to disclaim any stage intention,

and