This Phenomenon Of Incredible
Fecundity Is One Of The Mysteries Of That Time.
Few men of letters have
ever won so marvellous a success in their own lives, few have been so
little read after death.
The inscription on Lope's house records that he
is the author of two thousand comedies and twenty-one million of verses.
Making all possible deductions for Spanish exaggeration, it must still
be admitted that his activity and fertility of genius were prodigious.
In those days a play was rarely acted more than two or three times, and
he wrote nearly all that were produced in Spain. He had driven all
competitors from the scene. Cervantes, when he published his collection
of plays, admitted the impossibility of getting a hearing in the theatre
while this "monster of nature" existed. There was a courteous
acquaintance between the two great poets. They sometimes wrote sonnets
to each other, and often met in the same oratories. But a grand seigneur
like Frey Lope could not afford to be intimate with a shabby genius like
brother Miguel. In his inmost heart he thought Don Quixote rather low,
and wondered what people could see in it. Cervantes, recognizing the
great gifts of De Vega, and, generously giving him his full meed of
praise, saw with clearer insight than any man of his time that this
deluge of prodigal and facile genius would desolate rather than fructify
the drama of Spain. What a contrast in character and destiny between our
dilapidated poet and his brilliant neighbor across the way! The one
rich, magnificent, the poet of princes and a prince among poets, the
"Phoenix of Spanish Genius," in whose ashes there is no flame of
resurrection; the other, hounded through life by unmerciful disaster,
and using the brief respite of age to achieve an enduring renown; the
one, with his twenty millions of verses, has a great name in the history
of literature; but the other, with his volume you can carry in your
pocket, has caused the world to call the Castilian tongue the language
of Cervantes. We will not decide which lot is the more enviable. But it
seems a poet must choose. We have the high authority of Sancho for
saying, -
"Para dar y tener
Seso ha menester."
He is a bright boy who can eat his cake and have it.
In some incidents of the closing scenes of these memorable lives there
is a curious parallelism. Lope de Vega and Cervantes lived and died in
the same street, now called the Calle de Cervantes, and were buried in
the same convent of the street now called Calle de Lope de Vega. In this
convent each had placed a beloved daughter, the fruit of an early and
unlawful passion. Isabel de Saavedra, the child of sin and poverty, was
so ignorant she could not sign her name; while Lope's daughter, the
lovely and gifted Marcela de Carpio, was rich in the genius of her
father and the beauty of her mother, the high-born Maria de Lujan.
Cervantes's child glided from obscurity to oblivion no one knew when,
and the name she assumed with her spiritual vows is lost to tradition.
But the mystic espousals of the sister Marcela de San Felix to the
eldest son of God - the audacious phrase is of the father and priest Frey
Lope - were celebrated with princely pomp and luxury; grandees of Spain
were her sponsors; the streets were invaded with carriages from the
palace, the verses of the dramatist were sung in the service by the
Court tenor Florian, called the "Canary of Heaven;" and the event
celebrated in endless rhymes by the genteel poets of the period.
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