The death of Felipe II. in 1598 closes an epoch in the history of Castilian letters. Not merely has the Italian influence triumphed definitively: the chivalresque romance has well-nigh run its course; while mysticism and the pastoral have achieved expression and acceptance. Moreover, the most important of all developments is the establishment of the stage at Madrid in the Teatro de la Cruz and in the Teatro del Príncipe. There is evidence to prove that theatres were also built at Valencia, at Seville, and possibly at Granada. Nor was a foreign impulse lacking. Kyd's Spanish Tragedy records the invasion of England by Italian actors:—
In like wise the famous Alberto Ganasa and his Italian histrions revealed the art of acting to the Spains. Thenceforth every province is overrun by mummers, as may be read in the Viaje entretenido (1603) of Agustín de Rojas Villandrando, who denotes, with mock-solemn precision, the nine professional grades.
There was the solitary stroller, the bululú, tramping from village to village, declaiming short plays to small audiences, called together by the sacristan, the barber, and the parish priest, who—pidiendo limosna en un sombrero—passed round the hat, and sped the vagabond with a slice of bread and a cup of broth. A pair of strollers (such as Rojas himself and his colleague Ríos) was styled a ñaque, and did no more than spout simple entremeses in the open. The cangarilla was on a larger scale, numbering three or four actors, who gave Timoneda's Oveja Perdida, or some comic piece wherein a boy played the woman's part. Five men and a woman made up the carambaleo, which performed in farmhouses for such small wages as a loaf of bread, a bunch of grapes, a stew of cabbage; but higher fees were asked in larger villages—six maravedís, a piece of sausage, a roll of flax, and what not. Though "a spider could carry" its properties, says Rojas, yet the carambaleo contrived to fill the bill with a set piece, or two autos, or four entremeses. More pretentious was the garnacha, with its six men, its "leading lady," and a boy who played the ingénue. With four set plays, three autos, and three entremeses it would draw a whole village for a week. A large choice of pieces was within the means of the seven men, two women, and a boy that made up the bojiganga, which journeyed from town to town on horseback. Next in rank came the farándula, the stepping-stone to the lofty compañía of sixteen players, with fourteen "supers," capable of producing fifty pieces at short notice. To such a troupe, no doubt, belonged the Toledan Naharro, famous as an interpreter of the bully, and as the foremost of Spanish stage-managers. "He still further enriched theatrical adornment, substituting chests and trunks for the costume-bag. Into the body of the house he brought the musicians, who had hitherto sung behind the blanket. He did away with the false beards which till then actors had always worn, and he made all play without a make-up, save those who performed old men's parts, or such characters as implied a change of appearance. He introduced machinery, clouds, thunder, lightning, duels, and battles; but this reached not the perfection of our day."
This is the testimony of the most renowned personality in Castilian literature. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616) describes himself as a native of Alcalá de Henares, in a legal document signed at Madrid on December 18, 1580: the long dispute as to his birthplace is thus at last settled. His stock was pure Castilian, its solar being at Cervatos, near Reinosa: the connection with Galicia is no older than the fourteenth century. His family surname of Cervantes probably comes from the castle of San Cervantes, beyond Toledo, which was named after the Christian martyr Servandus. The additional name of Saavedra is not on the title-page of the writer's first book, the Galatea. However, Miguel de Cervantes uses the Saavedra in a petition addressed to Pope Gregory XIII. and Felipe II. in October 1578; and, as Cervantes was not then, though it is now, an uncommon name, the addition served to distinguish the author from contemporary clansmen. He was the second (though not, as heretofore believed, the youngest) son of Rodrigo de Cervantes Saavedra and of Leonor Cortinas. Of the mother we know nothing: garrulous as was her famous son, he nowhere alludes to her, nor did he follow the usual Spanish practice by adding her surname to his own. The father was a licentiate—of laws, so it is conjectured. Research only yields two facts concerning him: that he was incurably deaf, and that he was poor.
Cervantes' birthday is unknown. He was baptized at the Church of Santa María Mayor, in Alcalá de Henares, on Sunday, October 9, 1547. One Tomás González asserted that he had found Cervantes' name in the matriculation lists of Salamanca University; but the entry has never been verified since, and its report lacks probability. If Cervantes ever studied at any university, we should expect to find him at that of his native town, Alcalá de Henares. His name does not appear in the University calendar. Though he made his knowledge go far, he was anything but learned, and college witlings bantered him for having no degree. No information exists concerning his youth. He is first mentioned in 1569, when a Madrid dominie, Juan López de Hoyos, speaks of him as "our dear and beloved pupil"; and some conjecture that he was an usher in Hoyos' school. His earliest literary performance is discovered (1569) in a collection of verses on the death of Felipe II.'s third wife. The volume, edited by Hoyos, is entitled the Historia y relación verdadera de la enfermedad, felicísimo tránsito y suntuosas exequias fúnebres de la Serenísima Reina de España, Doña Isabel de Valois. Cervantes' contributions are an epitaph in sonnet form, five redondillas, and an elegy of one hundred and ninety-nine lines: this last being addressed to Cardinal Diego de Espinosa in the name of the whole school—en nombre de todo el estudio. These poor pieces are reproduced solely because Cervantes wrote them: it is very doubtful if he ever saw them in print. He is alleged to have been guilty of lèse-majesté in Hurtado de Mendoza's fashion; but this is surmise, as is also a pendant story of his love passages with a Maid of Honour. It is certain that, on September 15, 1569, a warrant was signed for the arrest of one Miguel de Cervantes, who was condemned to lose his right hand for wounding Antonio de Sigura in the neighbourhood of the Court. There is nothing to prove that our man was the culprit; but if he were, he had already got out of jurisdiction. Joining the household of the Special Nuncio, Giulio Acquaviva, he left Madrid for Rome as the Legate's chamberlain in the December of 1568.
He was not the stuff of which chamberlains are made; and in 1570 he enlisted in the company commanded by Diego de Urbina, captain in Miguel de Moncada's famous infantry regiment, at that time serving under Marc Antonio Colonna. It is worth noting that the Galatea is dedicated to Marc Antonio's son, Ascanio Colonna, Abbot of St. Sophia. In 1571 Cervantes fought at Lepanto, where he was twice shot in the chest and had his left hand maimed for life: "for the greater honour of the right," as he loved to think and say with justifiable vainglory. That he never tired of vaunting his share in the great victory is shown by his frequent allusions to it in his writings; and it should almost seem that he was prouder of his nickname—the Cripple of Lepanto—than of writing Don Quixote. He served in the engagements before Navarino, Corfu, Tunis, the Goletta; and in all he bore himself with credit. Returning to Italy, he seems to have learned the language, for traces of Italian idioms are not rare even in his best pages. From Naples he sailed for Spain in September 1575, with recommendatory letters from Don Juan de Austria and from the Neapolitan Viceroy. On September 26, his caravel, the Sol, was attacked by Moorish pirates, and, after a brave resistance, all on board were carried as prisoners into Algiers. There for five years Cervantes abode as a slave, writing plays between the intervals of his plots to escape, striving to organise a general rising of the thousands of Christians. Being the most dangerous, because the most heroic of them all, he became, in some sort, the chief of his fellows, and, after the failure of several plans for flight, was held hostage by the Dey for the town's safety. His release was due to accident. On September 19, 1580, the Redemptorist, Fray Juan Gil, offered five hundred gold ducats as the ransom of a private gentleman named Jerónimo Palafox. The sum was held insufficient to redeem a man of Palafox's position; but it sufficed to set free Cervantes, who was already shipped on the Dey's galley bound for Constantinople.[16] He is found at Madrid on December 19, 1580, and it is surmised that he served in Portugal and at the Azores. There are rumours of his holding some small post at Oran: however that may be, he returned to Spain, at latest, in the autumn of 1582. And henceforth he belongs to literature.
The plays written at Algiers are lost; but there survive two sonnets of the same period dedicated to Rufino de Chamberí (1577). A rhymed epistle to the Secretary of State, Mateo Vázquez, also belongs to this time. We must suppose Cervantes to have written copiously on regaining his liberty, since Gálvez de Montalvo speaks of him as a poet of repute in the Pastor de Fílida (1582); but the earliest signs of him in Spain are his eulogistic sonnets in Padilla's Romancero and Rufo Gutiérrez' Austriada, both published in 1583. Padilla repaid the debt by classing the sonneteer among "the most famous poets of Castile." In December 1584, Cervantes married Catalina de Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano, a native of Esquivias, eighteen years younger than himself. It is often said that he wrote the Galatea as a means of furthering his suit. It may be so. But the book was not printed by Juan Gracián of Alcalá de Henares till March 1585, though the aprobación and the privilege are dated February 1 and February 22, 1584. In the year after his marriage, Cervantes' illegitimate daughter, Isabel de Saavedra, was born. We shall have occasion to refer to her later. Our immediate concern is with the Primera Parte de Galatea, an unfinished pastoral novel in six books, for which Cervantes received 1336 reales from Blas de Robles; a sum which, with his wife's small dowry, enabled him to start housekeeping.[17] As a financial speculation the Galatea failed: only two later editions appeared during the writer's lifetime, one at Lisbon in 1590, the other at Paris in 1611. Neither could have brought him money; but the book, if it did nothing else, served to make him known.
He trimmed his sails to the popular breeze. Montemôr had started the pastoral fashion, Pérez and Gaspar Gil Polo had followed, and Gálvez de Montalvo maintained the tradition. Later in life, in the Coloquio de los Perros (Dialogue of the Dogs), Cervantes made his Berganza say that all pastorals are "vain imaginings, void of truth, written to amuse the idle"; yet it may be doubted if Cervantes ever lost the pastoral taste, though his sense of humour forced him to see the absurdity of the convention. It is very certain that he had a special fondness for the Galatea: he spared it at the burning of Don Quixote's library, praised its invention, and made the Priest exhort the Barber to await the sequel which is foreshadowed in the Galatea's text. This is again promised in the Dedication of the volume of plays (1615), in the Prologue to the Second Part of Don Quixote (1615), and in the Letter Dedicatory of Persiles y Sigismunda, signed on the writer's deathbed, April 19, 1616. For thirty-one years Cervantes held out the promise of the Galatea's Second Part: five times did he repeat it. It is plain that he thought well of the First, and that his liking for the genre was incorrigible.
His own attempt survives chiefly because of the name on its title-page. Pastorals differ little in essentials, and the kind offers few openings to Cervantes' peculiar humoristic genius. Like his fellow-practitioners, he crowds his stage with figures: he presents his shepherds Elicio and Erastro warbling their love for Galatea on Tagus bank; he reveals Mirenio enamoured of Silveria, Leonarda love-sick for Salercio, Lenio in the toils of Gelasia. Hazlitt, in his harsh criticism of Sidney's Arcadia, hits the defects of the pastoral, and his censures may be justly applied to the Galatea. There, as in the English book, we find the "original sin of alliteration, antithesis, and metaphysical conceit"; there, too, is the "systematic interpolation of the wit, learning, ingenuity, wisdom, and everlasting impertinence of the writer." Worst of all are "the continual, uncalled-for interruptions, analysing, dissecting, disjointing, murdering everything, and reading a pragmatical, self-sufficient lecture over the dead body of nature." But if Cervantes sins in this wise, he sins of set purpose and in good company. In his Fourth Book, he interpolates a long disquisition on the Beautiful which he calmly annexes from Judas Abarbanel's Dialoghi. As Sannazaro opens his Arcadia with Ergasto and Selvaggio, so Cervantes thrusts his Elicio and Erastro into the foreground of the Galatea; the funeral of Meliso is a deliberate imitation of the Feast of Pales; and, as the Italian introduced Carmosina Bonifacia under the name of Amaranta, the Spaniard perforce gives Catalina de Palacios Salazar as Galatea. Nor does he depart from the convention by placing himself upon the scene as Elicio, for Ribeiro and Montemôr had preceded him in the characters of Bimnardel and Sereno. Lastly, the idea and the form of the Canto de Calíope, wherein the uncritical poet celebrates whole tribes of contemporary singers, are borrowed from the Canto del Turia, which Gil Polo had interpolated in his Diana.
Prolixity, artifice, ostentation, monotony, extravagance, are inherent in the pastoral school; and the Galatea savours of these defects. Yet, for all its weakness, it lacks neither imagination nor contrivance, and its embroidered rhetoric is a fine example of stately prose. Save, perhaps, in the Persiles y Sigismunda, Cervantes never wrote with a more conscious effort after excellence, and, in results of absolute style, the Galatea may compare with all but exceptional passages in Don Quixote. Yet it failed to please, and the author turned to other fields of effort. His verses in Pedro de Padilla's Jardín Espiritual (1585) and in López Maldonado's Cancionero (1586) denote good-nature and a love of literature; and in both volumes Cervantes may have read companion-pieces written by a marvellous youth, Lope de Vega, whom he had already praised—as he praised everybody—in the Canto de Calíope. He could not foresee that in the person of this boy he was to meet his match and more. Meanwhile in 1587 he penned sonnets for Padilla's Grandezas y Excelencias de la Virgen, and for Alonso de Barros' Filosofía cortesana. Verse-making was his craze; and, in 1588, when the physician, Francisco Díaz, published a treatise on kidney disease—Tratado nuevamente impreso acerca de las enfermedades de los riñones—the unwearied poetaster was forthcoming with a sonnet pat to the strange occasion.
Still, though he cultivated verse with as sedulous a passion as Don Quixote spent on Knight-Errantries, he recognised that man does not live by sonneteering alone, and he tried his fate upon the boards. He died with the happy conviction that he was a dramatist of genius; his contemporaries ruled the point against him, and posterity has upheld the decision. He tells us that at this time he wrote between twenty and thirty plays. We only know the titles of a few among them—the Gran Turquesca, the Jerusalén, the Batalla Naval (attributed by Moratín to the year 1584), the Amaranta and the Bosque Amoroso (referred to 1586), the Arsinda and the Confusa (to 1587). It is like enough that the Batalla Naval was concerned with Lepanto, a subject of which Cervantes never tired; the Arsinda existed so late as 1673, when Juan de Matos Fragoso mentioned it as "famous" in his Corsaria Catalana; and our author himself ranked the Confusa as "good among the best." The touch of self-complacency is amusing, though one might desire a better security than Bardolph's.
Two surviving plays of the period are El Trato de Argel and La Numancia, first printed by Antonio de Sancha in 1784. The former deals with the life of the Christian slaves in Algiers, and recounts the passion of Zara the Moor for the captive Aurelio, who is enamoured of Silvia. We must assume that Cervantes thought well of this invention, since he utilised it some thirty years later in El Amante Liberal; but the play is merely futile. The introduction of a lion, of the Devil, and of such abstractions as Necessity and Opportunity, is as poor a piece of machinery as theatre ever saw; the versification is rough and creaking, improvised without care or conscience; the situations are arranged with a glaring disregard for truth and probability. Like Paolo Veronese, Cervantes could rarely resist the temptation of painting himself into his canvas, and in El Trato de Argel he takes care that the prisoner Saavedra should declaim his tirade. The piece has no dramatic interest, and is valuable merely as an over-coloured picture of vicissitudes by one who knew them at first-hand, and who presented them to his countrymen with a more or less didactic intention. Yet, even as a transcript of manners, this luckless play is a failure.
A finer example of Cervantes' dramatic power is the Numancia, on which Shelley has passed this generous judgment:—"I have read the Numancia, and, after wading through the singular stupidity of the First Act, began to be greatly delighted, and at length interested in a very high degree, by the power of the writer in awakening pity and admiration, in which I hardly know by whom he is excelled. There is little, I allow, to be called poetry in this play; but the command of language and the harmony of versification is so great as to deceive one into an idea that it is poetry." Nor is Shelley alone in his admiration. Goethe's avowal to Humboldt is on record:—"Sogar habe ich ... neulich das Trauerspiel Numancia von Cervantes mit vielem Vergnügen gelesen;" but eight years later he confided a revised judgment to Riemer. The gushing school of German Romantics waxed delirious in praise. Thus Friedrich Schlegel surpassed himself by calling the play "godlike"; and August Schlegel, not content to hold it for a dramatic masterpiece, would persuade us to accept it for great poetry. Even Sismondi declares that "le frisson de l'horreur et de l'effroi devient presque un supplice pour le spectateur."
Raptures apart, the Numancia is Cervantes' best play. He has a grandiose subject: the siege of Numantia, and its capture by Scipio Africanus after fourteen years of resistance. On the Roman side were eighty thousand soldiers; the Spaniards numbered four thousand or less; and the victors entered the fallen city to find no soul alive. With scenes of valour is mingled the pathetic love-story of Morandro and Lyra. But, once again, Cervantes fails as a dramatic artist; one doubts if he knew what a plot was, what unity of conception meant. He has scenes and episodes of high excellence, but they are detached from the main composition, and produce all the bad effect of a portrait painted in different lights. Abstractions fill the stage—War, Sickness, Hunger, Spain, the river Duero. But the tirades of rhetoric are unsurpassed by anything from Cervantes' pen, and Marquino's scene with the corpse in the Second Act is pregnant with a suggestion of weirdness which Mr. Gibson has well conveyed:—
Even in translation—still more in the original—the rhetoric of this passage is imposing; yet we perceive rhetoric to be contagious when Ticknor asserts that "there is nothing of so much dignity in the incantations of Marlowe's Faustus." Still more amazing is Ticknor's second appreciation:—"Nor does even Shakspeare demand from us a sympathy so strange with the mortal head reluctantly rising to answer Macbeth's guilty question, as Cervantes makes us feel for this suffering spirit, recalled to life only to endure a second time the pangs of dissolution." The school is decently interred which mistook critics for Civil Service Commissioners, and Parnassus for Burlington House. It is impossible to compare Cervantes' sonorous periods and Marlowe's majestic eloquence, nor is it less unwise to match his moving melodrama against one of the greatest tragedies in the world. His great scene has its own merit as an artificial embellishment, as a rhetorical adornment, as an exercise in bravura; but the episode is not only out of place where it is found—it leads from nowhere to nothing. More dramatic in spirit and effect is the speech declaimed by Scipio when the last Numantian, Viriato, hurls himself from the tower:—
Here, once more, we are dealing with a passage which gains by detachment from its context. To speak plainly, the interest of the Numancia is not dramatic, and its versification, good of its kind, may easily be overpraised, as it was by Shelley. First and last, the play is a devout and passionate expression of patriotism; and, as such, the writer's countrymen have held it in esteem, never claiming for it the qualities invented by well-meaning foreigners. Lope de Vega and Calderón still hold the stage, from which Cervantes, the disciple of Virués, was driven three centuries ago; and they survive, the one as an hundredfold more potent dramatist, the other as an infinitely greater poet. Yet, like the ghost raised by Marquino, Cervantes was to undergo a momentary resurrection. When Palafox (and Byron's Maid) held Zaragoza, during the War of Independence, against the batteries of Mortier, Junot, and Lannes, the Numancia was played within the besieged walls, so that Spaniards of the nineteenth century might see that their fathers had known how to die for freedom. The tragedy was received with enthusiasm; the marshals of the world's Greatest Captain were repulsed and beaten; and Cervantes' inspiriting lines helped on the victory. In life, he had never met with such a triumph, and in death no other could have pleased him better.
He asserts, indeed, that his plays were popular, and he may have persuaded himself into that belief. His idolaters preach the legend that he was driven from the boards by that "portent of genius," Lope de Vega. This tale is a vain imagining. Cervantes failed so wretchedly in art that in 1588 he left the Madrid stage to seek work in Seville; and no play of Lope's dates so early as that, save one written while he was at school. In June 1588, Cervantes became Deputy-Purveyor to the Invincible Armada, and in May 1590 he petitioned for one of four appointments vacant in Granada, Guatemala, Cartagena, and La Paz. But he never quite abandoned literature. In 1591 he wrote a romance for Andrés de Villalba's Flor de varios y nuevos romances, and, in the following year, he contracted with the Seville manager, Rodrigo Osorio, to write six comedies at fifty ducats each—no money to be paid unless Osorio should rank the plays "among the best in Spain." No more is heard of this agreement, and Cervantes disappears till 1594, when he was appointed tax-gatherer in Granada. Next year he competed at a literary tournament held by the Dominicans of Zaragoza in honour of St. Hyacinth, and won the first prize—three silver spoons. His sonnet to the famous sea-dog, Santa Cruz, is printed in Cristóbal Mosquera de Figueroa's Comentario en breve Compendio de Disciplina militar (1596), and his bitter sonnet on Medina Sidonia's entry into Cádiz, already sacked and evacuated by Essex, is of the same date.
In 1597, being in Seville about the time of Herrera's death, Cervantes wrote his sonnet in memory of the great Andalucían. In September of this year the sonneteer was imprisoned for irregularities in his accounts, due to his having entrusted Government funds to one Simón Freire de Lima, who absconded with the booty. Released some three months later, Cervantes was sent packing by the Treasury, and was never more employed in the public service. Lost, as it seemed, to hope and fame, the ruined man lingered at Seville, where, in 1598, he wrote two sonnets and a copy of quintillas on Felipe II.'s death. Four years of silence were followed by the inevitable sonnet in the second edition of Lope de Vega's Dragontea (1602). It is certain that all this while Cervantes was scribbling in some naked garret; but his name seemed almost forgotten from the earth. In 1603 he was run to ground, and served with an Exchequer writ concerning those outstanding balances, still unpaid after nearly eight years. He must appear in person at Valladolid to offer what excuse he might. Light as his baggage was, it contained one precious, immediate jewel—the manuscript of Don Quixote. The Treasury soon found that to squeeze money from him was harder than to draw blood from a stone: the debt remained unsettled. But his journey was not in vain. On his way to Valladolid, he found a publisher for Don Quixote. The Royal Privilege is dated September 26, 1604, and in January 1605 the book was sold at Madrid across the counter of Francisco de Robles, bookseller to the King. Cervantes dedicated his volume, in terms boldly filched from Herrera and Medina, to the Duque de Béjar. In a previous age the author's kinsman had anticipated the compliment by addressing a gloss of Jorge Manrique's Coplas to Álvaro de Stúñiga, second Duque de Béjar.
It is difficult to say when Don Quixote was written; later, certainly, than 1591, for it alludes to Bernardo de la Vega's Pastor de Iberia, published in that year. Legend says that the First Part was begun in gaol, and so Langford includes it in his Prison Books and their Authors. The only ground for the belief is a phrase in the Prologue which describes the work as "a dry, shrivelled, whimsical offspring ... just what might be begotten in a prison." This may be a mere figure of speech; yet the tradition persists that Cervantes wrote his masterpiece in the cellar of the Casa de Medrano at Argamasilla de Alba. Certain it is that Argamasilla is Don Quixote's native town. The burlesque verses at the end indicate precisely that "certain village in La Mancha, the name of which," says Cervantes dryly, "I have no desire to recall." Quevedo witnesses that the fact was accepted by contemporaries, and topography puts it beyond doubt. The manuscript passed through many hands before reaching the printer, Cuesta: whence a double mention of it before publication. The author of the Pícara Justina, who anticipated Cervantes' poor device of the versos de cabo roto—truncated rhymes—in Don Quixote, ranks the book beside the Celestina, Lazarillo de Tormes, and Guzmán de Alfarache; yet the Pícara Justina was licensed on August 22, 1604. The title falls from a far more illustrious pen: in a private letter written on August 14, 1604, Lope de Vega observes that no budding poet "is so bad as Cervantes, none so silly as to praise Don Quixote." There will be occasion to return presently to this much-quoted remark.
Clearly the book was discussed, and not always approved, by literary critics some months before it was in print: but critics of all generations have been taught that their opinions go for nothing with the public, which persists in being amused against rules and dogmas. Don Quixote carried everything before it: its vogue almost equalled that of Guzmán de Alfarache, and by July a fifth edition was preparing at Valencia. Cervantes has told us his purpose in plain words:—"to diminish the authority and acceptance that books of chivalry have in the world and among the vulgar." Yet his own avowal is rejected. Defoe averred that Don Quixote was a satire on Medina Sidonia; Landor applauded the book as "the most dexterous attack ever made against the worship of the Virgin"; and such later crocheteers as Rawdon Brown have industriously proved Sancho Panza to be Pedro Franqueza, and the whole novel to be a burlesque on contemporary politics.[18]
Cervantes was unlucky in life, nor did his misfortunes end with his days. Posthumous idolatry seeks to atone for contemporary neglect, and there has come into being a tribe of ignorant fakirs, assuming the title of "Cervantophils," and seeking to convert a man of genius into a common Mumbo-Jumbo. A master of invention, a humourist beyond compare, an expert in ironic observation, a fellow meet for Shakespeare's self: all that suffices not for these fanatical dullards. Their deity must be accepted also as a poet, a philosophic thinker, a Puritan tub-thumper, a political reformer, a finished scholar, a purist in language, and—not least amazing—an ascetic in private morals. A whole shelf might be filled with works upon Cervantes the doctor, Cervantes the lawyer, the sailor, the geographer, and who knows what else? Like his contemporary Shakespeare, Cervantes took a peculiar interest in cases of dementia; and, in England and Spain, the afflicted have shown both authors much reciprocal attention. We must even take Cervantes as he was: a literary artist stronger in practice than in theory, great by natural faculty rather than by acquired accomplishment. His learning is naught, his reasonings are futile, his speculation is banal. In short passages he is one of the greatest masters of Castilian prose, clear, direct, and puissant: but he soon tires, and is prone to lapse into Italian idioms, or into irritating sentences packed with needless relatives. Cervantes lives not as a great practitioner in style, a sultan of epithet—though none could better him when he chose; nor is he potent as a purely intellectual influence. He is immortal by reason of his creative power, his imaginative resource, his wealth of invention, his penetrating vision, his inimitable humour, his boundless sympathy. Hence the universality of his appeal: hence the splendour of his secular renown.
It is certain that he builded better than he knew, and that not even he realised the full scope of his work: we know from Goethe that the maker has to be taught his own meaning. The contemporary allusions, the sly hits at foes, are mostly mysteries for us, though they amuse the laborious leisure of the commentator. Chivalresque romances are with last year's snows: but the interest of Don Quixote abides for ever. Cervantes set out intending to write a comic short story, and the design grew under his hand till at length it included a whole Human Comedy. He himself was as near akin to Don Quixote as a man may be: he knew his chivalresque romances by heart, and accounted Amadís de Gaula as "the very best contrived book of all those of that kind." Yet he has been accused by his own people of plotting his country's ruin, and has been held up to contempt as "the headsman and the ax of Spain's honour." Byron repeats the ridiculous taunt:—
The chivalresque madness was well-nigh over when our author made his onset: he but hastened the end. After the publication of Don Quixote, no new chivalresque romance was written, and only one—the Caballero del Febo (1617)—was reprinted. And the reason is obvious. It was not that Cervantes' work was merely destructive, that he was simply a clever artist in travesty: it was that he gave better than he took away, and that he revealed himself, not only to Spain, but to the world, as a great creative master, and an irresistible, because an universal, humourist.
There is endless discussion as to the significance of his masterpiece, and the acutest critics have uttered "great argument about it and about." That an allegory of human life was intended is incredible. Cervantes presents the Ingenious Gentleman as the Prince of Courtesy, affable, gallant, wise on all points save that trifling one which annihilates Time and Space and changes the aspect of the Universe: and he attaches to him, Sancho, self-seeking, cautious, practical in presence of vulgar opportunities. The types are eternal. But it were too much to assume that there exists any conscious symbolic or esoteric purpose in the dual presentation. Cervantes is inspired solely by the artistic intention which would create personages, and would divert by abundance of ingenious fantasy, by sublimation of character, by wealth of episode and incident, and by the genius of satiric portraiture. He tessellates with whatsoever mosaic chances to strike his fancy. It may be that he inlays his work with such a typical sonnet as that which Mr. Gosse has transferred from the twenty-third chapter of Don Quixote to In Russet and Silver—an excellent example, which shall be quoted here:—
Hereunto the writer adds reminiscences of slavery, picaresque scenes observed during his vagabond life as tax-gatherer, tales of Italian intrigue re-echoed from Bandello, flouts at Lope de Vega, a treasure of adventures and experience, a strain of mockery both individual and general. Small wonder if the world received Don Quixote with delight! There was nothing like unto it before: there has been nothing to eclipse it since. It ends one epoch and begins another: it intones the dirge of the mediæval novel: it announces the arrival of the new generations, and it belongs to both the past and the coming ages. At the point where the paths diverge, Don Quixote stands, dominating the entire landscape of fiction. Time has failed to wither its variety or to lessen its force, and posterity accepts it as a masterpiece of humoristic fancy, of complete observation and unsurpassed invention. It ceases, in effect, to belong to Spain as a mere local possession, though nothing can deprive her of the glory of producing it. Cervantes ranks with Shakespeare and with Homer as a citizen of the world, a man of all times and countries, and Don Quixote, with Hamlet and the Iliad, belongs to universal literature, and is become an eternal pleasaunce of the mind for all the nations.
Cervantes had his immediate reward in general acceptance. Reprints of his book followed in Spain, and in 1607 the original was reproduced at Brussels. The French teacher of Spanish, César Oudin, interpolated the tale of the Curious Impertinent between the covers of Julio Iñíguez de Medrano's Silva Curiosa, published for the second time at Paris in 1608; in the same year Jean Baudouin did this story into French, and in 1609 an anonymous arrangement of Marcela's story was Gallicised as Le Meurtre de la Fidélité et la Défense de l'Honneur. This sufficed for fame: yet Cervantes made no instant attempt to repeat his triumph. For eight years he was silent, save for occasional copies of verse. The baptism of the future Felipe IV., and the embassy of Lord Nottingham—best known as Howard of Effingham, the admiral in command against the Invincible Armada—are recorded in courtly fashion by the anonymous writer of a pamphlet entitled Relación de lo sucedido en la Ciudad de Valladolid. Góngora, who dealt with both subjects, flouts Cervantes as the pamphleteer; but the authorship is doubtful. Cervantes is next heard of in custody on suspicion of knowing more than he chose to tell concerning the death of Gaspar de Ezpeleta, in June 1605. Legend makes Ezpeleta the lover of Cervantes' natural daughter, Isabel de Saavedra: "the point of honour" at once suggests itself, and the incident has inspired both dramatists and novelists. A conspiracy of silence on the part of biographers has done Cervantes much wrong, and is responsible for exaggerated stories of his guilt. He was discharged after inquiry, and seems to have been entirely innocent of contriving Ezpeleta's end. Many romantic stories have gathered about the personality of Isabel: she has been passed upon us as the daughter of a Portuguese "lady of high quality," and the prop of her father's declining days. These are idolatrous inventions: we now know for certain that her mother's name was Ana Franca de Rojas, a poor woman married to Alonso Rodríguez, and that the girl herself (who in 1605 was unable to read and write) was indentured as general servant to Cervantes' sister, Magdalena de Sotomayor, in August 1599.[19] Thence she passed to Cervantes' household, and it is even alleged that she was twice married in her father's lifetime. She has been so picturesquely presented by imaginative "Cervantophils," that it is necessary to state the humble truth here and now, for the first time in English. Thus the grotesque travesty of Cervantes as a plaster saint returns to the Father of Lies, who begat it. Confirmation of his exploits as a loose liver in gaming-houses is afforded by the Memorias de Valladolid, now among the manuscripts in the British Museum.[20]
Such diversions as these left him scant time for literature. The space between 1605 and 1608 yields the pitiful show of three sonnets in four years: To a Hermit, To the Conde de Saldaña, To a Braggart turned Beggar. Even this last is sometimes referred to Quevedo. It should hardly seem that prosperity suited Cervantes. Meanwhile, his womenfolk gained their bread by taking in the Marqués de Villafranca's sewing. Still, he made no sign: the author of Don Quixote sank lower and lower, writing letters for illiterates at a small fee. The Letter to Don Diego de Astudillo Carrillo, the Story of what happens in Seville Gaol (a sequel to Cristóbal de Chaves' sketch made twenty years before), the Dialogue between Sillenia and Selanio, the three entremeses entitled Doña Justina y Calahorra, Los Mirones, and Los Refranes—all these are of doubtful authenticity. In April 1609, Cervantes took a thought and mended: he joined Fray Alonso de la Purificación's new Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament, and in 1610 wrote his sonnet in memory of Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. In 1611 he entered the Academia Selvaje, founded by that Francisco de Silva whose praises were sung later in the Viaje del Parnaso, and he prepared that unique compound of fact and fancy, the rarest humour and the most curious experience—his twelve Novelas Exemplares, which were licensed on August 8, 1612, and appeared in 1613.
These short tales were written at long intervals of time, as the internal evidence shows. In the forty-seventh chapter of Don Quixote there is mention by name of Rinconete y Cortadillo, a picaresque story of extraordinary brilliancy and point included among the Exemplary Novels; and a companion piece is the Coloquio de los Perros, no less a masterpiece in little. Monipodio, master of a school for thieves; his pious jackal, Ganchuelo, who never steals on Friday; the tipsy Pipota, who reels as she lights her votive candle—these are triumphs in the art of portraiture. Not even Sancho Panza is wittier in reflection than the dog Berganza, who reviews his many masters in the light of humorous criticism. No less distinguished is the presentation, in El Casamiento Engañoso, of the picaroons Campuzano and Estefanía de Caicedo; and as an exercise in fantastic transcription of mania the Licenciado Vidriera lags not behind Don Quixote. So striking is the resemblance that some have held the Licentiate for the first sketch of the Knight; but an attentive reading shows that he was not conceived till after Don Quixote was in print. In 1814, Agustín García Arrieta included La Tía fingida (The Mock Aunt) among Cervantes' novels, and, in a more complete form, it now finds place in all editions. Admirable as the story is, the circumstance of its late appearance throws doubt on its authenticity; yet who but Cervantes could have written it? Perhaps the surest sign of his success is afforded by the quality and number of his northern imitators.