He bids the beginner to put together his story with the utmost care, laying the foundations in the first act, contriving unexpected complications for the second and concealing the solution of the action until the very last moment possible, as otherwise the spectators may get up and go out, when once they can foresee the end. He lays all his stress upon adroitness and ingenuity of plot-building; and such casual remarks as he makes upon character-delineation seem perfunctory. In thus emphasizing the primary importance of the action Lope is only echoing Aristotle,--altho he probably was not aware of this. And the practise of the Spanish playwrights under the lead of Lope was closely akin to that of their contemporaries, the English playwrights under the lead of Kyd, and again later under the lead of Beaumont and Fletcher. Like Lope, Kyd in his way and Beaumont and Fletcher in theirs, were story-tellers on the stage. Poets they were all of them, but as playwrights they depended on plot, on suspense and especially on surprize--often achieved only by contradiction of character. The abiding interest of the 'Arte Nuevo' is two-fold. It resides partly in the suggestiveness of the elementary lessons in the art of playmaking, which Lope here proffers to apprentices in the art and which are invaluable as an aid for proper appreciating the methods of the Spanish playwrights of the Age of Gold. It resides partly in the curiously deprecating attitude taken by Lope toward his own works, altho he was approaching the pinnacle of his fame when he penned this didactic poem. Is the great Spanish playwright sincere in his humility before the code of the Classicists? Is his self-abasement genuine--or is it ironic? Morel-Fatio follows Menéndez y Pelayo in accepting it at its face value. Guillaume Huszar, in his useful book on Corneille and the Spanish theater, thinks that when Lope pretends to disparage his own plays he is not to be taken seriously. I confess that I should like to agree with this latter view; and there is some little internal evidence in support of it. But the balance is rather in favor of the former opinion. Yet however honest may be Lope's willingness to do penance to the Classicist code which he admits to have outraged, his is a proud humility after all. He is not really as abased and as plaintive as some of his critics have asserted. Modest as he may be, he takes care to make his own position plain. For all his easy attitude and his tolerant geniality, for all his lightness of touch on the one side and his pedantic citation on the other, he does not fail to insist on his authorship of nearly half a thousand plays and to remind his auditors that he has continuously succeeded in pleasing the public, even tho he had to violate the rules in order to win this success.