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Dialogues And Essays

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 Dialogues And Essays

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.
us the good service of reprinting it. It still awaits an English
translator who, when he takes it in hand, may perhaps have
something destructive to say respecting its alleged date (1368).
Such a translator might also give us an English version of
Moricos, los mis moricos, los que ganáis mi soldada,66

which is thought to be the next oldest of these romances fronterizos.

Or he might attempt to render
Álora la bien cercada, tu que estás á par del río,67

which commemorates the death of Diego de Ribera during the siege

of Álora in 1434. A passage in the Laberinto de Fortuna implies that
Ribera’s death was the theme of many popular songs in the time of
Juan de Mena,68 and possibly the extant romance may be taken to
represent them. There is another fine ballad on the historic victory of
the Infante Fernando (the first regent during Juan II.’s minority) at
Antequera in 1410:—
De Antequera partió el moro tres horas antes del dia.69
This also calls for translation, for all that we possess is Gibson’s
version of Timoneda’s recast, a copy of verses disfigured by
superfine interpolations:—
His words were mingled with the tears
That down his cheeks did roll:
‘Alas! Narcissa of my life,
Narcissa of my soul.’
Nymphs called Narcissa are never met with in popular primitive
poetry; but Gibson (from whose version of Timoneda I have just
quoted) has happily translated some genuine specimens of the
romances fronterizos. Thus he has given us a version of the justly
celebrated
¡Abenámar, Abenámar, moro de la morería!—70

in which Juan II. questions the Moor, and declares himself, according
to an Arabic poetical convention, the suitor of Granada:—
 ‘Abenámar, Abenámar,
Moor of Moors, and man of worth,
On the day when thou wert cradled,
There were signs in heaven and earth....

Abenámar, Abenámar,
With thy words my heart is won!
Tell me what these castles are,
Shining grandly in the sun!’

‘That, my lord, is the Alhambra,

This the Moorish mosque apart,
And the rest the Alixares
Wrought and carved with wondrous art.’...

Up and spake the good King John,

To the Moor he thus replied:
‘Art thou willing, O Granada,
I will woo thee for my bride,
Cordova shall be thy dowry,
And Sevilla by its side.’

‘I’m no widow, good King John,

I am still a wedded wife;
And the Moor, who is my husband,
Loves me better than his life!’
Gibson has missed an opportunity in not translating one 110 of the
popular ballads on the precocious Master of the Order of Calatrava,
Rodrigo Girón, who was killed at the siege of Loja in 1482:—
¡Ay, Dios qué buen caballero el Maestre de Calatrava!71

But he makes amends with a version of a sixteenth-century

romance72 which he entitles The Lady and the Lions: the story has
been versified by Schiller, and has been still more admirably retold
by Browning in The Glove. And we have also from Gibson a version
of a rather puzzling romance given by Pérez de Hita:—
Cercada está Santa Fe, con mucho lienzo encerado.73

The fact that full rhymes take the place of assonants is a decisive
argument against the antiquity, and also against the popular origin,
of this ballad in which, as Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo points out, a rather
insignificant Garcilaso de la Vega of the end of the fifteenth century
is confused with a namesake and relative who fell at Baza in 1455,
and is further represented as the hero of a feat of arms—the slaying
of a Moor who insultingly attached the device Ave Maria to his
horse’s tail—which was really performed by an ancestor of his about
a hundred and fifty years earlier. This later Garcilaso was a favourite
of fortune, for, at the end of the sixteenth century, Gabriel Lobo
Lasso de la Vega wrote a romance ascribing to him Hernando del
Pulgar’s daring exploit—his riding into Granada, fastening with his
dagger a placard inscribed Ave Maria to the door of the chief
mosque, and thus proclaiming his intention of converting it into a
Christian church.
It is needless to discuss Lockhart’s group of so-called ‘Moorish
ballads.’74 If any one wishes to translate a romance of this kind, let
him try to convey to us the adroitly suggested orientalism of
Yo me era mora Moraima, morilla de un bel catar:
cristiano vino á mi puerta, cuitada, per me engañar.75
With scarcely an exception, the ‘Moorish ballads’ show no trace of
Moorish origin, and with very few exceptions, they are not popular
ballads. They are clever, artificial presentations of the picturesque
Moor as suggested in the anonymous Historia de Abindarraez, and
elaborated by Pérez de Hita. We do not put it too high in saying that
Pérez de Hita’s Guerras civiles de Granada—the earliest historical
novel—is responsible for all the impossible Moors and incredible
Moorish women of poetry and fiction.
Unmask me now these faces,
Unmuffle me these Moorish men, and eke these dancing Graces...
To give ye merry Easter I’ll make my meaning plain,
Mayhap it never struck you, we have Christians here in Spain.
But Góngora’s voice was as the voice of one crying in the
wilderness. The tide rose, overflowed the Pyrenees, floated
Mademoiselle de Scudéri’s Almahide and Madame de Lafayette’s
Zaïde into fashion, and did not ebb till long after Washington Irving
followed Pérez de Hita’s lead by ascribing his graceful, fantastic
Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada to a non-existent historian
whom he chose to call Fray Antonio Agapida. The Moor of fiction is
so much more attractive than the Moor of history that he has
imposed himself upon the world. Most of us still see him, with the
light of other days around him, as we first met him in Scott’s
Talisman, or in Chateaubriand’s Aventures du dernier Abencérage.
Still the fact remains that he is a conventional lay-figure, and that a
Spanish poem in which he appears transfigured and glorified is
neither ancient nor popular, but is necessarily the work of some late
Spanish writer who knows no more of Moors than he can gather
from Pérez de Hita’s gorgeously imaginative pages.
No serious fault can be found with Lockhart’s selection of what he
calls ‘Romantic Ballads.’ Most of them are excellent examples,
though The Moor Calaynos, an abbreviated rendering of
Ya cabalga Calaynos á la sombra de una oliva,76

is no longer ‘generally believed to be among the most ancient’

ballads. It was certainly widely known, as Lockhart says, for tags
from it have become proverbs; but it mentions Prester John and the
Sultan of Babylon, and these personages are unknown to genuine
old popular poetry. According to Milá y Fontanals and Sr. Menéndez y
Pelayo, the Calaínos ballad is one of the latest in the 113
Charlemagne cycle, and is derived from a Provençal version of
Fierabras. On the other hand, the original of The Escape of Gayferos
—
Estábase la condesa en su estrado asentada77—
is an authentic old popular romance derived, it is believed, more or
less directly from the Roman de Berthe, while the much later
Melisendra ballad—
El cuerpo preso en Sansueña y en Paris cautiva el alma78—

owes most of its celebrity to the fact that it is quoted by Ginés de

Pasamonte when he acts as showman of the puppets in Don
Quixote. Again, The Lady Alda’s Dream—
 En Paris está doña Alda la esposa de don Roldan79—

is an ancient romance of intensely pathetic beauty suggested by the

famous passage in the Chanson de Roland describing Charlemagne’s
announcement of Roland’s death to his betrothed Alde, Oliver’s
sister:—
‘Soer, chere amie, d’hume mort me demandes...’
Alde respunt: ‘Cist moz mei est estranges.
Ne placet Deu ne ses seinz ne ses angles
Après Rollant que jo vive remaigne!’
Pert la culur, chiet as piez Carlemagne,
Sempres est morte. Deus ait mercit de l’anme!
Another famous ballad in the Charlemagne cycle, translated by
Lockhart under the title of The Admiral Guarinos—
Mala la vistes, franceses, la caza de Roncesvalles80—
is also universally known from its being quoted in Don Quixote. 114
Its origin is not clear, but it seems to be related to Ogier le Danois,
and it has certainly lived long and travelled far if, as Georg Adolf
Erman reports, it was sung in Russian in Siberia as recently as 1828.
A more special interest attaches to the fine elfin ballad—
A cazar va el caballero, á cazar como solía81—

which Lockhart entitles The Lady of the Tree. It is, as he says, ‘one
of the few old Spanish ballads in which mention is made of the
Fairies,’ and the seven years’ enchantment reminded him of ‘those
Oriental fictions, the influence of which has stamped so many
indelible traces on the imaginative literature of Spain.’ The theory of
Oriental influence is not brought forward so often nowadays, and is
challenged in what was thought to be its impregnable stronghold.
The melancholy Kelt has taken the place of the slippery Oriental; but
theories come and go, and we can only hope that our grandchildren
will smile as indulgently at our Kelts as we smile at our grandfathers’
Arabs.
Hélo, hélo por do viene el infante vengador82
is the original of The Avenging Childe, a superb ballad which is
better represented in Gibson’s version. Compare, for instance, the
following translation with Lockhart’s:—
’Tis a right good spear, with a point so sharp, the toughest plough-share
might pierce,
For seven times o’er was it tempered fine, in the blood of a dragon fierce,
And seven times o’er was it whetted keen, till it shone with a deadly
glance,
For its steel was wrought in the finest forge, in the realm of mighty
France.
115Its shaft was made of the Aragon wood, as straight as the straightest
stalk,
And he polished the steel, as he galloped along, on the wings of his
hunting hawk;
‘Don Quadros, thou traitor vile, beware! I’ll slay thee where thou dost
stand,
At the judgment seat, by the Emperor’s side, with the rod of power in his
hand.’
This is more faithful, and consequently more vivid; and the retention
of the Emperor, whom Lockhart (for metrical purposes) reduces to a
King, gives the English reader a useful hint that the ballad belongs to
the Charlemagne series. But its source is obscure, and its symbolism
is as perplexing as symbolism is apt to be.
All who have read Birds of Passage—that is to say, everybody who
reads anything—will
remember the black wharves and the slips,
And the sea-tides tossing free;
And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And the beauty and mystery of the ships
And the magic of the sea.
These lines are recalled by Count Arnaldos, Lockhart’s translation of
the enchanting romance which Longfellow has incorporated in The
Seaside and the Fireside83:—
116¡Quien hubiese tal ventura sobre las aguas del mar,
como hubo el Conde Arnaldos la mañana de san Juan!84
Probably nine out of every ten readers would turn to the Buch der
Lieder for the loveliest lyric on the witchery of song:—
Die schönste Jungfrau sitzet
Dort oben wunderbar,
Ihr goldnes Geschmeide blitzet,
Sie kämmt ihr goldenes Haar.

Sie kämmt es mit goldenem Kamme,

Und singt ein Lied dabei;
Das hat eine wundersame,
Gewaltige Melodei....

Ich glaube, die Wellen verschlingen

Am Ende Schiffer und Kahn!
Und das hat mit ihrem Singen
Die Lore-Ley gethan.
They may be right, but, if the tenth reader preferred 117 El Conde
Arnaldos, I should not think him wrong. Though Heine speaks of
Ein Märchen aus alten Zeiten,
this seems to be a façon de parler, for the Lorelei legend was
invented by Clemens Brentano barely twenty years before Heine
wrote his famous ballad. However this may be, in producing his
effect of mystic weirdness the German artist does not eclipse the
anonymous Spanish singer who lived four centuries earlier. This is a
bold thing to say; yet nobody who reads El Conde Arnaldos will think
it much too bold.
Passing by a pleasing song (not in the romance form),85 we come
to the incomplete Julianesa ballad which Lockhart printed, so he tells
us, chiefly because it contained an allusion to the pretty Spanish
custom of picking flowers on St. John’s Day:—
¡Arriba, canes, arriba! ¡que rabia mala os mate!86
But, so far from being (like its immediate predecessor in Lockhart’s
book) an artistic performance, the Julianesa ballad is one of the
most primitive in the Gayferos group. Its robust inspiration is in
striking contrast to the too dulcet Song of the Galley,87 which is
followed by The Wandering Knight’s Song, a capital version of a
romance famous all the world over owing to its quotation by Don
Quixote at the inn:—
Mis arreos son las armas, mi descanso es pelear.88

118We need say nothing of the Serenade,89 The Captive Knight and
the Blackbird,90 Valladolid,91 and Dragut the Corsair.92 We should
gladly exchange these translations of late and mediocre originals for
versions of
Fonte-frida, fonte-frida, fonte-frida y con amor;93
or of one of the few but interesting ballads belonging to the Breton
cycle, such as the old romance on Lancelot from which Antonio de
Nebrija quotes—
Tres hijuelos habia el rey, tres hijuelos, que no mas;94

or of the curious romance glossed by Gil Vicente, Cristóbal de

Castillejo, and Jorge de Montemôr—
La bella mal maridada, de las lindas que yo ví;95
or of the well-known ballad which seems to have strayed out of the
series of romances fronterizos—
Mi padre era de Ronda, y mi madre de Antequera.96

Fortunately these have been translated by Gibson. But we must not

part from Lockhart on bad terms, for he ends with the ballad of
Count Alarcos and the Infante Solisa:—
Retraída está la Infanta bien así como solía.97

This romance, which is often ascribed to a certain Pedro de Riaño, is

certainly not older than the sixteenth century, and is rather an
artistic than a popular poem; but it is unquestionably an impressive
composition remarkable for concentrated and pathetic beauty.
Though I have far outrun my allotted time, I have merely brushed
the fringe of the subject; still, perhaps enough has been said to stir
your interest, and to set you reading the Romancero under the
sagacious guidance of Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo. That will occupy you
for many a long day. To those who have not the time to read
everything, but who wish to read the very best of the best, I cannot
be wrong in recommending the exquisite selection of romances
published by M. Foulché-Delbosc a few months ago.98
 CHAPTER V

THE LIFE OF CERVANTES

Some men live their romances, and some men write them. It was
given to Cervantes to do both, and, as his art was not of the
impersonal order, it is scarcely possible to read his work without a
desire to know more of the rich and imposing individuality which
informs it. Posthumous legends are apt to form round men of the
heroic type who have been neglected while alive, and posterity
seems to enjoy this cheap form of atonement. Cervantes is a case in
point. But the researches of the last few years have brought much
new material to light, and have dissipated a cloud of myths
concerning him: we are not yet able to see him as he was at every
stage of his chequered career, but we are nearer him than we ever
were before. We are passing out of the fogs of fable, and are
learning that, in Cervantes’s case, facts are as strange as fiction—
and far more interesting.
It is a foible with the biographers of great men to furnish their
heroes with a handsome equipment of ancestors, and Cervantes’s
descent has been traced back to the end of the tenth century by
these amateur genealogists. We may admire their industry, and
reject their conclusions. It is quite possible that Cervantes was of
good family, but we cannot go further back than two generations.
His grandfather, Juan de Cervantes, appears to have been a country
lawyer who died, without attaining distinction or fortune, about the
middle of the sixteenth century. Juan’s son was Rodrigo de
Cervantes who married Leonor de Cortinas: and the great novelist
was the fourth of their seven children. Rodrigo de Cervantes was a
lowly precursor of Sangrado—a simple apothecary-surgeon, of
inferior professional status, seldom settled long in one place, earning
a precarious living by cupping and blistering. His son Miguel was
born at Alcalá de Henares—possibly, as his name suggests, on St.
Michael’s Day (September 29)—and he was baptized there on
Sunday, October 9, 1547, in the church of Santa María la Mayor.
There was a tradition that Cervantes matriculated at Alcalá, and his
name was discovered in the university registers by an investigator
who looked for it with the eye of faith. This is one of many pleasing,
pious legends. Rodrigo de Cervantes was not in a position to send
his sons to universities. A poor, helpless, sanguine man, he
wandered in quest of patients and fortune from Alcalá to Valladolid,
from Valladolid to Madrid, from Madrid to Seville, and it has been
conjectured that Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra spent some time in
the Jesuit school at Seville. The dog Berganza, in the Coloquio de los
Perros, recalls his edification at ‘seeing the loving-kindness, the
discretion, the solicitude and the skill with which those saintly
fathers and masters taught these lads, so that the tender shoots of
their youth should not be twisted, nor take a wrong bend in the path
of virtue which, together with the humane letters, they continually
pointed out to them.’ But it is evident that Cervantes can have had
little formal schooling. He was educated in the university of practical
experience, and picked up his learning as he could.
He made the most of his casual opportunities. Obviously the man
who wrote Don Quixote must have read the books of chivalry, the
leading poets, the chronicles, dramatic romances like the Celestina,
picaresque novels like Lazarillo de Tormes, pastoral tales like the
Diana, the cancioneros, and countless broadsides containing popular
ballads; and he must have read them at this time, for his maturer
years were spent in campaigning, or in the discharge of petty,
exacting duties. In his early youth, too, he made acquaintance with
the theatre, witnessing the performances of the enterprising Lope de
Rueda, actor, manager and playwright, the first man in Spain to set
up a travelling booth, and bid for public support. The impression was
ineffaceable: from Cervantes’s account of his experience, given half
a century later, it may be gathered that he listened and watched
with the uncritical rapture of a clever, ardent lad, and that his
ambition to become a successful dramatist was born there and then.
In the meantime, while following his father in his futile journeys, he
received a liberal education. Jogging along the high-road, lodging in
wayside inns, strolling in market-places, he met men and women of
all ranks, from nobles to peasants, and thus began to hoard his
literary capital.
Like most young men of literary ambition, Cervantes began by
versifying, and, as he never grew old in heart, he versified as long as
he lived. A sonnet, written between 1560 and 1568, has come to
light recently, and is interesting solely as the earliest extant work of
Cervantes. By 1566 he was settled in Madrid, and two years later he
wrote a series of elegiacs on the death of the Queen, Isabel de
Valois: these were published in a volume edited by Juan López de
Hoyos, a Madrid schoolmaster, who refers to Cervantes as his ‘dear
and beloved pupil.’ As the pupil was twenty before López de Hoyos’s
school was founded, the meaning of the phrase is obscure. Perhaps
Cervantes had been a pupil under López de Hoyos elsewhere:
perhaps he was an usher in López de Hoyos’s new school: frankly,
we know nothing of his circumstances. He makes his formal entry
into literature, and then vanishes out of sight, and apparently out of
Spain. What happened to him at this time is obscure. We know on
his own statement that he was once camarero to Cardinal Giulio
Acquaviva; we know that Acquaviva, not yet a Cardinal, was in
Madrid during the winter of 1568, and that he started for Rome
towards the end of the year; and we know from documentary
evidence that Cervantes was in Rome at the end of the following
year. How he got there, how and when he entered Acquaviva’s
service, or when and why he left it—these, as Sir Thomas Browne
would say, are all ‘matters of probable conjecture.’
While Cervantes was in Rome, a league was forming by Spain,
Venice and the Holy See against the Sultan Selim: war was in sight,
and every high-spirited young Spaniard in Italy must have felt that
his place was in the ranks. It has been thought that Cervantes
served as a supernumerary before he joined Acquaviva’s household;
but we do not reach solid ground till 1571 when Cervantes is
discovered as a soldier in a company commanded by Diego de
Urbina, ‘a famous captain of Guadalajara,’ as the Captive in Don
Quixote called him thirty-four years later. Urbina’s company belonged
to the celebrated tercio of Miguel de Moncada, and in September
1571 it was embarked at Messina on the Marquesa, one of the
galleys under the command of Don John of Austria. At dawn on
Sunday, October 7, Don John’s armada lay off the Curzolarian Islands
when two sail were sighted on the horizon, and soon afterwards the
Turkish fleet followed. Cervantes was ill with fever, but refused to
listen to his comrades who begged him to stay below: death in the
service of God and the King, he said, was preferable to remaining
under cover. The Marquesa was in the hottest of the fight at
Lepanto, and when the battle was won Cervantes had received three
wounds, two in the chest, and one in the left hand. Like most old
soldiers, he loved to fight his battles over again, and, to judge from
his writings, he was at least as proud of having been at Lepanto as
of creating Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
He was in hospital for seven months at Messina, received an
increase of pay, and returned to duty in April 1572. This throws light
upon a personal matter. Current likenesses of Cervantes, all
imaginary and most of them mere variants of the portrait contrived
in the eighteenth century by William Kent, usually represent him as
having lost an arm. This is manifestly wrong: a one-armed private
would have been discharged as not worth his pay and rations.
Cervantes was appointed to Manuel Ponce de León’s company in the
tercio of Lope de Figueroa—the vehement martinet who appears in
Calderón’s Alcalde de Zalamea—and took part in three campaigns;
he was present at the fiasco of Navarino in 1572, at the occupation
of Tunis in 1573, and at the attempted relief of the Goletta in 1574.
He had already done garrison duty in Genoa and Sardinia, and was
now stationed successively at Palermo and Naples. It was clear that
there was to be no more fighting for a while, and, as there was no
opening for Cervantes in Italy, he determined to seek promotion in
Spain. Don John of Austria recommended him for a company in one
of the regiments then being raised for Italy, and laid stress upon his
‘merits and services,’ and a similar recommendation was made by
the Duke of Sesa, Viceroy of Sicily. These flattering credentials and
testimonials were destined to cause much embarrassment and
suffering to the bearer; but they encouraged him to make for Spain
with a confident heart.
His optimism was to be put to the proof. On September 26, 1575,
the Sol, with Cervantes and his brother Rodrigo on board, was
separated from the rest of the Spanish squadron in the
neighbourhood of Les Saintes Maries near Marseilles, and was
captured by Moorish pirates. The desperate resistance of the
Spaniards was unavailing; they were overcome by superior numbers
and were carried off to Algiers. What follows would seem
extravagant in a romance of adventures, but the details are
supported by irrefragable evidence. As Algiers was at this time the
centre of the slave-trade, the prisoners cannot have felt much doubt
as to what was in store for them. Cervantes’s first owner was a
certain Dali Mami, a Greek renegade, and captain of a galley. He
read the recommendatory letters from Don John of Austria and the
Duke of Sessa, and (not unnaturally) jumped at the conclusion that
he had drawn a prize: his slave might not be of great use so far as
manual labour was concerned, but any one who was personally
acquainted with two such personages as Don John and the Duke
must presumably be a man of consequence, and would assuredly be
worth a heavy ransom. The first result of this fictitious importance
was that Cervantes was put in irons, and chains; and, when these
were at last removed, he was carefully watched.
Cervantes found means to baffle his sentries. His first attempt to
escape was made in 1576: it was an ignominious failure. He and his
fellow-prisoners set out on foot to walk to Orán, the nearest Spanish
outpost; their Moorish guide played them false, and there was
nothing for it but to go back to Algiers. In 1577 Rodrigo de
Cervantes was ransomed—he was reckoned cheaper than his
brother—and he undertook to send a vessel to carry off Miguel and
his friends. Meanwhile Cervantes enlisted the sympathies of a
Spanish renegade, a gardener from Navarre named Juan; between
them they dug out a cave in a garden near the sea, and smuggled
into it one by one fourteen Christian slaves who were secretly fed
during several months with the help of another renegade from
Melilla, a scoundrel known as El Dorador. It is easier to say that the
scheme was a bad one than to suggest anything better: it was
within an ace of succeeding. The vessel sent by Rodrigo de
Cervantes drew near the shore on September 28, and was on the
point of embarking those hidden in the cave when a Moorish fishing-
boat passed by and scared the crew, who stood out to sea again. A
second attempt at a rescue was made, but it was too late. The plot
had been revealed by El Dorador to Hassan Pasha, the Dey of
Algiers, and, when some of the crew landed to convey the fugitives
on board, the garden was surrounded by Hassan’s troops. The entire
band of Christians was captured, and Cervantes at once avowed
himself the sole organiser of the conspiracy. Brought bound before
Hassan, he adhered to his statement that his comrades were
innocent, and that he took the entire responsibility for the plot. The
gardener was hanged; after some hesitation, Hassan decided to
spare Cervantes’s life, and finally bought him from Dali Mami for five
hundred crowns.
It is difficult to account for this act of relative mercy in a man who
is described in Don Quixote as the murderer of the human race, a
hæmatomaniac who delighted in murder for murder’s sake, one who
hanged, impaled, tortured and mutilated his prisoners every day. It
may be that he was genuinely struck by Cervantes’s unflinching
courage; it may be that he expected an immense ransom for a man
who was plainly the leader of the captives. What is certain is that
Cervantes was now Hassan’s slave; though imprisoned in irons, he
soon showed that his heroic spirit was unbroken. He sent a letter to
Martín de Córdoba, the governor of Orán, asking for aid to enable
himself and three other captives to escape; the messenger seemed
likely to fulfil his mission, but was arrested close to Orán, sent back,
and impaled. For writing the letter Cervantes was sentenced to two
thousand blows, but the sentence was remitted, and it would almost
seem as though Cervantes completely forgot the incident, for in Don
Quixote he goes out of his way to record that un tal Saavedra—a
certain Saavedra, Something-or-Other Saavedra (who can be nobody
but himself)—was never struck by Hassan, and was never
threatened by Hassan with a blow. This may appear perplexing, but
as the writer goes on to say that Hassan never addressed a harsh
word to this Saavedra, it is plain that the whole passage is an
idealistic arabesque; the discrepancy between the gloss and the
facts shows the danger of seeking exact biographical data in any
imaginative work, however heavily freighted with personal
reminiscences.
Hassan remitted the sentence, and, remarking that ‘so long as he
had the maimed Spaniard in custody, his Christians, ships and the
entire city were safe,’ he redoubled his vigilance. For two years the
prisoner made no move, but plainly he was not resigned nor
disheartened, for he conceived the idea of inducing the Christian
population of Algiers to rise and capture the city. It was no mad,
impossible project; a similar rising had been successful at Tunis in
1535, and there were over twenty thousand Christians in Algiers.
Once more Cervantes was betrayed, and once more he escaped
death. A less ambitious scheme also miscarried. In 1579 he took into
his confidence a Spanish renegade and two Valencian traders, and
persuaded the Valencians to provide an armed vessel to rescue him
and some sixty other Christian slaves; but before the plan could be
carried out it was revealed to Hassan by a Dominican monk, Juan
Blanco de Paz. Very little is known of Blanco de Paz, except that he
came from Montemolín near Llerena, and that he gave himself out
as being a commissary and familiar of the Inquisition. Why he should
turn informer at all, is a mystery: why he should single out
Cervantes as the special object of his hatred is no less a mystery.
The Valencian merchants got wind of his treachery, and, dreading
lest they might be implicated, begged Cervantes to make his escape
on a ship which was about to start for Spain. To accept this proposal
would have been to desert his friends and to imperil their lives:
Cervantes rejected it, assuring the alarmed Valencians that he would
not reveal anything to compromise them, even if he were tortured.
He was as good as his word. Brought into Hassan’s presence with his
hands tied behind him and the hangman’s rope round his neck, he
was threatened with instant death unless he gave up the names of
his accomplices. But he was undaunted and immovable, asserting
that the plot had been planned by himself and four others who had
got away, and that no one else had any active share in it. Perhaps
there was a certain economy of truth in this statement, but it served
its immediate purpose: though Cervantes was placed under stricter
guard, Hassan spared the other sixty slaves involved.
This was Cervantes’s last attempt to escape. His family were doing
what they could to procure his release. They were miserably poor,
and poverty often drives honest people into strange courses. To
excite pity, and so obtain a concession which would help towards
ransoming her son, Cervantes’s mother passed herself off as a
widow, though her husband was still alive, a superfluous old man,
now grown incurably deaf, and with fewer patients than ever. By
means of such dubious expedients some two hundred and fifty
ducats were collected and entrusted to Fray Juan Gil and Fray Antón
de la Bella, two monks engaged in ransoming the Christian slaves at
Algiers. The sum was insufficient. Hassan curtly told Fray Juan Gil
that all his slaves were gentlemen, that he should not part with any
of them for less than five hundred ducats, and that for Jerónimo de
Palafox (apparently an Aragonese of some position) he should ask a
ransom of a thousand ducats. Fray Juan Gil was specially anxious to
release Palafox, and made an offer of five hundred ducats; but
Hassan would not abate his terms. The Dey and the monk haggled
from spring till autumn. Hassan then went out of office, and made
ready to leave for Constantinople to give an account of his
stewardship. His slaves were already embarked on September 19,
1580, when Fray Juan Gil, seeing that there was no hope of
obtaining Palafox’s release by payment of five hundred ducats,
ransomed Cervantes for that sum. It is disconcerting to think that, if
the Trinitarian friar had been able to raise another five hundred
ducats, we might never have had Don Quixote. Palafox would have
been set at liberty, while Cervantes went up the Dardanelles to meet
a violent death in a last attempt at flight.
 He stepped ashore a free man after five years of slavery, but his
trials in Algiers were not ended. The enigmatic villain of the drama,
Juan Blanco de Paz, had been busy trumping up false charges to be
lodged against Cervantes in Spain. It was a base and despicable act
duly denounced by the biographers; but we have reason to be
grateful to Blanco de Paz, for Cervantes met the charges by
summoning eleven witnesses to character who testified before Fray
Juan Gil. Their evidence proves that Cervantes was recognised as a
man of singular courage, kindliness, piety and virtue; that his
authority among his fellow-prisoners had excited the malicious
jealousy of Blanco de Paz who endeavoured to corrupt some of the
witnesses; and—ludicrous detail!—that the informer had been
rewarded for his infamy with a ducat and a jar of butter. This
testimony, recorded by a notary, is confirmed by the independent
evidence of Fray Juan Gil himself, and by Doctor Antonio de Sosa, a
prisoner of considerable importance who answered the twenty-five
interrogatories in writing. The enquiry makes us acquainted with all
the circumstances of Cervantes’s captivity, and shows that he was
universally regarded as an heroic leader by those best able to judge.
His vindication being complete, he left Algiers for Denia on
October 24, and reached Madrid at some date previous to December
18. His position was lamentable. He was in his thirty-fourth year, and
had to begin life again. Perhaps if Don John had lived, Cervantes
might have returned to the army; but Don John was dead, and his
memory was not cherished at court. Cervantes had no degree, no
profession, no trade, no craft except that of sonneteering: his life
had been spent in the service of the King, and he endeavoured to
obtain some small official post. Accordingly he made for Portugal,
recently annexed by Philip II., tried to find an opening, and was sent
as King’s messenger to Orán with instructions to call at Mostaganem
with despatches from the Alcalde. The mission was speedily
executed, and Cervantes found himself adrift. He settled in Madrid,
made acquaintance with some prominent authors of the day, and, in
default of more lucrative employment, betook himself to literature.
He was always ready to furnish a friend with a eulogistic sonnet on
that friend’s immortal masterpiece, and thus acquired a certain
reputation as a facile, fluent versifier. But sonnets are expensive
luxuries, and Cervantes wanted bread. He earned it by writing for
the stage: to this period no doubt we must assign the Numancia and
Los Tratos de Argel, as well as many other pieces which have not
survived. Cervantes was like the players in Hamlet. Seneca was not
too heavy, nor Plautus too light for him: he was ready to supply
‘tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-
pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene
individable, or poem unlimited.’ It was a hard struggle to keep the
wolf from the door, but perhaps this was the happiest period of
Cervantes’s life. He was on friendly terms with poets like Pedro de
Padilla and Juan Rufo Gutiérrez; managers did not pay him lavishly
for his plays, but at least they were set upon the stage, and the
applause of the pit was to him the sweetest music in the world.
Moreover, following the example of his friend Luis Gálvez de
Montalvo, he was engaged upon a prose pastoral, and, with his
optimistic nature, he easily persuaded himself that this romance
would make his reputation—and perhaps his fortune. He was now
nearing the fatal age of forty, and it was high time to put away the
follies of youth. Breaking off a fugitive amour with a certain Ana
Franca (more probably Francisca) de Rojas, he married a girl of
nineteen, Catalina de Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano, daughter of a
widow owning a moderate estate at Esquivias, a small town near
Toledo, then famous for its wine, as Cervantes is careful to inform
us. Doubtless his courtship was like Othello’s.
I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field,
Of hair-breadth ‘scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
And portance in my travels’ history.
This to hear would Catalina seriously incline, yet there is reason to
think that the members of her family were less susceptible, and
regarded Cervantes as an undesirable suitor. He undoubtedly was,
from a mundane point of view; but the marriage took place on
December 12, 1584, and next spring the First Part of La Galatea
(which had been licensed in the previous February) was published. It
is perhaps not without significance that the volume was issued at
Alcalá de Henares: it would have been more natural and probably
more advantageous to publish the book at Madrid where Cervantes
resided, but his name carried no weight with the booksellers of the
capital, and no doubt he was glad enough to strike a bargain with
his fellow-townsman Blas de Robles. Robles behaved handsomely,
for he paid the author, then unknown outside a small literary circle, a
fee of 1336 reales—say £30, equal (we are told) to nearly £150
nowadays. Perhaps some modern novelists have received even less
for their first work. With this small capital the newly-married couple
set up house in Madrid: the bride had indeed a small dowry
including forty-five chickens, but the dowry was not made over to
her till twenty months later. The marriage does not seem to have
been unhappy, as marriages go; but, owing to Cervantes’s
wandering existence, the pair saw little of each other till the last ten
or twelve years of their married life.
By the death of his father on June 13, 1585, Cervantes became
the head of the family, and the position was no sinecure. His sister
Luisa had entered the convent of Barefooted Carmelites at Alcalá de
Henares twenty years before this date, and his brother Rodrigo had
been promoted to a commission in the army for his signal gallantry
at the Azores. But Cervantes’s mother and his sisters, Andrea and
Magdalena, were unprovided for, and looked to him for help. He
resumed writing for the stage, and is found witnessing a legal
document at the request of Inés Osorio, wife of the theatrical
manager Jerónimo Velázquez, with whose name that of Lope de
Vega is unpleasantly associated. Now, if not earlier,—as a
complimentary allusion in the Galatea might suggest—Cervantes
must have met that marvellous youth who was shortly to become
the most popular dramatist of the age. Meanwhile Cervantes’s affairs
were going ill. According to his own statement he wrote from twenty
to thirty plays between 1582 and 1587; but these plays cannot have
brought him much money, for there are proofs that some of his
family sold outright to a pawnbroker certain articles which Cervantes
had left in pledge two years before. Clearly he was hard pressed. He
eked out his income by accepting other work unconnected with
literature, executed business commissions as far away as Seville, and
looked around for permanent employment. He found it as
commissary to the Invincible Armada which was then fitting out, and
in the autumn of 1587 he took up his new duties in Andalusia. This
amounts to a confession of defeat. If a man of exceptional literary
genius can thrive on literature, he does not abandon it for a less
agreeable occupation. It is a fine thing to write masterpieces, but in
order to write them you must contrive to live. Cervantes’s
masterpieces lay in the future, and in the meantime he felt the pinch
of hunger.
He appears to have obtained his appointment through the
influence of a judge in the High Court of Seville, Diego de Valdivia, a
namesake of the affable captain in El Licenciado Vidriera; and, after
a few months’ probation, his appointment was confirmed anew in
January 1588. He had already discovered that there were serious
inconveniences attaching to his post, for he had incurred
excommunication for an irregular seizure of wheat at Écija. It would
be tedious to follow him in his professional visits to the outlying
districts of Andalusia. Everything comes to an end at last—even the
equipment of the Invincible Armada: when the fleet sailed to meet
the enemy Cervantes cheered it on to victory with an enthusiastic
ode, and in a second ode he deplored the great catastrophe. He
continued in the public service as commissary to the galleys,
collecting provisions at a salary of twelve reales a day, making
Seville his centre, and lodging in the house of Tomás Gutiérrez.
Weary of the sordid life, he applied in 1590 for a post in America,
but failed to obtain it. At the end of the petition, Doctor Núñez
Morquecho wrote: ‘Let him seek some employment hereabouts.’
Blessings on Doctor Núñez Morquecho, the conscientious official! If
he had granted the petitioner’s request, Cervantes might have been
more prosperous, but he would not have written Don Quixote. He
was forced to remain where he was, engulfed in arid and vexatious
routine.
Still one would imagine that he must have discharged his duties
efficiently, for he was one of four commissaries specially commended
to the King in January 1592 by the new Purveyor-General Pedro de
Isunza. Meanwhile his condition grew rather worse than better: his
poverty was extreme. The financial administration was thoroughly
disorganised, and in 1591 Cervantes had not yet received his salary
for 1588. He seems (not unnaturally) to have lost interest in his
work, and to have become responsible for the indiscreet proceedings
of a subordinate at Teba. Henceforward he was in constant trouble
with the authorities. In August 1592 his accounts were found to be
irregular, and his five sureties were compelled to pay the balance; he
was imprisoned at Castro del Río in September for alleged illegal
perquisitioning at Écija, but was released on appeal. Now and then
he was tempted to return to literature. He signed a contract at
Seville early in September 1592 undertaking to furnish the manager,
Rodrigo Osorio, with six plays at fifty ducats apiece: the conditions
of the agreement were that Osorio was to produce each play within
twenty days of its being delivered to him, and that Cervantes was to
receive nothing unless the play was ‘one of the best that had been
acted in Spain.’ The imprisonment at Castro del Río a fortnight later
interfered with this project: no more is heard of it, and Cervantes
resumed his work as commissary. Two points of personal interest are
to be noted in the ensuing years: in the autumn of 1593 Cervantes
lost his mother, and in the autumn of 1594 he visited Baza, where
(as Sr. Rodríguez Marín has shown recently in an open letter
addressed to me99) his old enemy Blanco de Paz was residing. As
the population of Baza amounted only to 1537 persons at the time,
the two men may easily have met: the encounter would have been
worth witnessing, for Cervantes was a master of pointed expression.
He passed on his dreary round to Málaga and Ronda, returning to
his headquarters at Seville, where, most likely, he wrote the poem in
honour of St. Hyacinth which won the first prize at Saragossa on
May 7, 1595. As the prize consisted of three silver spoons, it did not
greatly relieve his financial embarrassments. These rapidly grew
worse. Cervantes had deposited public moneys with a Portuguese
banker in Seville; the banker failed and fled, and, as Cervantes was
unable to refund the amount, he was suspended. There is a blank in
his history from September 1595 to January 1597, when the money
was recovered from the bankrupt’s estate. Cervantes, however, was
not restored to his post. This is not surprising; for, though most of us
regard him with an affection as real as can be felt for any one who
has been in his grave nearly three hundred years, even our partiality
stops short of calling him a model official. He was not cast in the
official mould. Cervantes, collecting oil and wrangling over corn in
Andalusia, is like Samson grinding in the prison house at Gaza.
Misfortune pursued him. The treasury accountants called upon him
to furnish sureties that he would attend the Exchequer Court at
Madrid within twenty days of receiving a summons dated September
6, 1597. Unable to find bail, he was imprisoned till the beginning of
December, when he was released with instructions to present
himself at Madrid within thirty days. He does not appear to have left
Seville, and he neglected a similar summons in February 1599. This
may seem like contempt of court, but no doubt the real explanation
is that he had not the money to pay for the journey.
On July 2, 1600, Rodrigo de Cervantes, then an ensign serving
under the Archduke Albert in Flanders, was killed in action; but
Miguel de Cervantes probably did not hear of this till long
afterwards. He now vanishes from sight, for there is another blank in
his record from May 1601 to February 1603. We may assume that he
lived in extreme poverty at Seville, and when next heard of—at
Valladolid in 1603—his circumstances had not greatly improved. His
sister Andrea was employed as needlewoman by the Marqués de
Villafranca, and her little bill is made out in Cervantes’s handwriting:
clearly every member of the family contributed to the household
expenses, and every maravedí was welcome. Presumably Cervantes
had come to Valladolid in obedience to a peremptory mandamus
from the Exchequer Court. A brief enquiry must have convinced the
registrars that, with the best will in the world, he was not in a
position to make good the sum which (as they alleged) was due to
the treasury, and they left him in peace for three years with a cloud
over him. He had touched bottom. He had valiantly endured the
buffets of fortune, and was now about to enter into his reward.
His mind to him a kingdom was, and during the years of his
disgrace in Seville he had lived, unhindered by squalid circumstance,
in a pleasaunce of reminiscence and imagination. All other doors
being closed to him, he returned to the house of literature, took pen
and paper, gave literary form to his experiences and imaginings,
and, when drawing on to sixty, produced the masterpiece which has
made his name immortal. It may well be, as he himself hints, that
Don Quixote was begun in Seville jail: perhaps it was finished there.
At any rate there was little to be added to it when the author
reached Valladolid in 1603—little beyond the preface and burlesque
preliminary verses. By the summer of 1604 Cervantes had found a
publisher, and it had leaked out that the book contained some
caustic references to distinguished contemporaries. This may
account for Lope de Vega’s opinion, expressed in August 1604 (six
months before the work was published), that ‘no poet is as bad as
Cervantes, nor so silly as to praise Don Quixote.’ This was not
precisely a happy forecast. Don Quixote appeared early in 1605, was
hailed with delight, and received the dubious compliment of being
pirated in Lisbon. Cervantes was the man of the moment, in the first
flush of his popularity, when chance played him an unpleasant trick.
On the night of June 27, 1605, a Navarrese gallant named Gaspar de
Ezpeleta was wounded while in the neighbourhood of the Calle del
Rastro, called for aid at the door of No. 11 where Cervantes lodged,
was helped into the house, and died there two days later. The
inmates were arrested on suspicion, examined by the magistrate,
and released on July 1. The minutes of the examination were
unpublished till recent years, and these furtive tactics gravely injured
the memory of Cervantes, for they suggested the idea that the
examination revealed something to his discredit. It reveals that
Cervantes’s natural daughter, Isabel de Saavedra (whose mother,
Ana Franca de Rojas, had died in 1599 or earlier), was now residing
with her father; it proves that Cervantes was still poor, and that
calumnious gossip was current in Valladolid; but there is not a tittle
of evidence to show that any member of the Cervantes family ever
heard of Ezpeleta till he came by his death.
Cervantes had made for himself a great reputation, but Don
Quixote did not apparently enrich him: otherwise he would not have
asked his publisher for an advance of 450 reales, as we know that
he did at some date previous to November 23, 1607. However, we
must renounce the pretension to understand Cervantes’s financial
affairs. His daughter Isabel, who was unmarried in 1605, reappears
in 1608 as the widow of Diego Sanz del Aguila, and as the mother of
a daughter: in 1608 she married a certain Luis de Molina, and there
are complicated statements respecting a house in the Red de San
Luis from which it is impossible to gather whether the house
belonged to Isabel, to her daughter, or to her father. We cannot
wonder that Cervantes was the despair of the Treasury officials:
these officials did, indeed, make a last attempt to extract an
explanation from him on November 6 of this very year of 1608, and
thenceforward left him in peace.
He settled in Madrid to pass his serene old age. An atmosphere of
devotion began to reign in the house in the Calle de la Magdalena
where he lived with his wife and his sisters, Andrea and Magdalena.
In 1609 he was among the first to join the newly founded
Confraternity of the Slaves of the Most Blessed Sacrament; in the
same year his wife received the habit of the Tertiaries of St. Francis,
as also did Andrea who died four months later (October 9); in 1610
his wife and his surviving sister Magdalena both became professed
Tertiaries of St. Francis. It would appear that Cervantes had been
aided by the generosity of the Conde de Lemos, and he could not
hide his deep chagrin at not being invited to join the household
when Lemos was nominated to the viceroyalty of Naples in 1610.
The new viceroy chose better than he knew. Cervantes applied
himself more closely to literature which he had neglected (so far as
publication goes) for the last five years, and, after the death of his
sister Magdalena in 1611, the results of his renewed activity were
visible. In 1612, when he became a member of the Academia
Selvaje (where we hear of his lending a wretched pair of spectacles
to Lope de Vega), he finished his Novelas Exemplares which
appeared next year. He published his serio-comic poem, the Viage
del Parnaso, in 1614; in 1615 he issued a volume containing eight
plays and eight interludes, and also published the Second Part of
Don Quixote. It is curious that so many things which must have
seemed misfortunes to Cervantes have proved to be a gain to us. In
1614 an apocryphal Don Quixote was published at Tarragona by
Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda of whom nothing has been
discovered, and this spurious sequel contained a preface filled with
insolent personalities. If Cervantes had received any one of the
appointments in Spanish America for which he petitioned, we should
not have had the first Don Quixote; if he had gone to Naples with
Lemos we should never have had the second; if it had not been for
Avellaneda’s insults, we might have had only an unfinished sequel.
Cervantes’s life was now drawing to a close, but his industry was
prodigious. Apart from fugitive verses he was engaged on Los
Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, on a play entitled El Engaño á los
ojos, the long-promised continuation of the Galatea, and two works
which he proposed to call Las Semanas del Jardín and El famoso
Bernardo. All are lost to us except Persiles y Sigismunda which
appeared posthumously in 1617.
We catch interesting glimpses of Cervantes in the last phase. He
has left a verbal portrait of himself as he looked when he was sixty-
six, and it is the only authentic portrait of him in existence. He was
‘of aquiline features, with chestnut hair, smooth and unclouded
brow, bright eyes, and a nose arched, though well proportioned,
silver beard, once golden twenty years ago, long moustache, small
mouth, teeth of no consequence, since he had only six and these in
ill condition and worse placed, inasmuch as they do not correspond
to one another; stature about the average, neither tall nor short,
ruddy complexion, fair rather than dark, slightly stooped in the
shoulders, and not very active on his feet.’ Two years later Noel
Brûlart de Sillery came to Madrid on a special mission from the
French Court, and his suite were intensely curious to hear what they
could of Cervantes; they learned that he was ‘old, a soldier, a
gentleman, and poor.’ At this time, his health must have begun to
fail: it was undoubtedly failing fast while he wrote Persiles y
Sigismunda. He was apparently dependent on the bounty of Lemos
and of Bernardo de Sandoval, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo.
The hand of death was on him when he wrote to the Cardinal on
March 26, 1616, a letter expressing his gratitude for a recent
benefaction. On April 2 he was professed as a Tertiary of St. Francis,
and the profession took place at the house in the Calle de León to
which he had removed in 1611 or earlier. He was never to leave it
again alive: on April 18 he received Extreme Unction; on April 19 he
wrote the celebrated dedication of Persiles y Sigismunda to Lemos;
on April 23 he died, and on April 24 he was buried in the convent of
the Trinitarian nuns in the Calle del Humilladero—the street which
now bears the name of his great rival Lope. His wife outlived him by
ten years, and his daughter by thirty-six; we hear no more of his
granddaughter after 1608. Presumably she died in infancy: if so, the
family became extinct upon the death of Isabel de Saavedra in 1652.
Cervantes was no bloodless ascetic, no incarnation of dreary
righteousness: we do him wrong, if we present him in that crude,
intolerable light. With some defects of character and with some
lapses of conduct, he is a more interesting and more attractive
personality than if he were—what perhaps no one has ever been—a
bundle of almost impossible perfections. He was even as we are, but
far nobler—braver, more resigned to disappointment, more patient
with the folly which springs eternal in each of us. This inexhaustible
sympathy, even more than his splendid genius, is the secret of his
conquering charm. He is one of ourselves, only incomparably
greater.
 His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, ‘This was a man.’
But it is not for us to write his epitaph. He needs no marble
sepulchre, and he has none, for the precise spot where he rests is
unknown. He has built himself a lordlier and more imperishable
monument than we could fashion for him—a monument which will
endure so long as humour, wisdom, and romance enchant mankind.
 CHAPTER VI

THE WORKS OF CERVANTES

The best and wisest of men have their delusions—especially with

respect to themselves and their capabilities—and Cervantes was not
free from such natural infirmities. He made his first appearance in
literature with a sonnet addressed to Philip II.’s third wife, Isabel de
Valois, and as this poem is not included in any Spanish edition of his
works, I make no apology for quoting it (in an English version by
Norman MacColl which has not yet been published).
Most Gracious Queen, within whose breast prevail
What thoughts to mortals by God’s grace do come,
Oh general refuge of Christendom,
Whose fame for piety can never fail.
Oh happy armour! with that well-meshed mail
Great Philip clothed himself, our sovereign,
Illustrious King of the broad lands of Spain,
Who fortune and the world holds in his baile.
What genius would adventure to proclaim
The good that thine example teaches us;
If thou wert summoned to the realms of day,
Who in thy mortal state put’st us to shame?
Better it is to feel and mutter ‘hush,’
Than what is difficult to say, aloud to say.

This is not a masterpiece in little, nor even a marvel of adroitness;

but it is highly interesting as the earliest extant effort of one who
was destined to become a master, and, moreover, it supplies us with
his favourite poetical formulæ. In his description of the Queen as the
143general refuge of Christendom,
Whose fame for piety can never fail;

in his allusion to the

Illustrious King of the broad lands of Spain,
Who fortune and the world holds in his baile;
Cervantes strikes the characteristic notes of devotion, patriotism,
and loyalty to his sovereign. Though he vastly enlarged the circle of
his themes later on, he was sufficiently representative of his own
time and country to introduce these three motives into his
subsequent writings whenever a plausible occasion offered. This is
particularly notable in his fugitive verses. Sainte-Beuve says that
nearly all men are born poets, but that, as a rule, the poet in us dies
young. It was not so with Cervantes—so far as impulse was
concerned. From youth to old age he was a persistent versifier. As
we have seen, he first appeared in print with elegiacs on the death
of Isabel de Valois; as a slave in Algiers he dedicated sonnets to
Bartolomeo Ruffino, and from Algiers also he appealed for help to
Mateo Vázquez in perhaps the most spirited and sincere of his
poetical compositions; he was not long free from slavery when he
supplied Juan Rufo Gutiérrez with a resounding patriotic sonnet, and
Pedro de Padilla with devotional poems. As he began, so he
continued. He has made merry at the practice of issuing books with
eulogistic prefatory poems; but he observed the custom in his own
Galatea, and he was indefatigable in furnishing such verses to his
friends. All subjects came alike to him. He would as soon praise the
quips and quillets of López Maldonado as lament the death of the
famous admiral Santa Cruz, and he celebrated with equal
promptitude a tragic epic on the lovers of Teruel and a technical
treatise on kidney diseases. It must, I think, be allowed that
Cervantes was readily stirred into song.
At the end of his career, in his mock-heroic Viage del Parnaso, he
cast a backward glance at his varied achievement in literature, and,
with his usual good judgment, admitted wistfully that nature had
denied him the gift of poetry. As the phrase stands, and baldly
interpreted, it would seem that excessive modesty had led Cervantes
to underestimate his powers. He was certainly endowed with
imagination, and with a beautifying vision; but, though he had the
poet’s dream, he had not the faculty of verbal magic. It was not
given to him to wed immortal thoughts to immortal music, and this
no doubt is what he means us to understand by his ingenuous
confession. His verdict is eminently just. Cervantes has occasional
happy passages, even a few admirable moments, but no lofty or
sustained inspiration. He recognised the fact with that transparent
candour which has endeared him to mankind, not dreaming that
uncritical admirers in future generations would seek to crown him
with the laurel to which he formally resigned all claim. Yet we read
appreciations of him as a ‘great’ poet, and we can only marvel at
such misuse of words. If Cervantes be a ‘great’ poet, what adjective
is left to describe Garcilaso, Luis de León, Lope de Vega, Góngora
and Calderón?
A sense of measure, of relative values, is the soul of criticism, and
we may be appreciative without condescending to idolatry, or even
to flattery. Cervantes was a rapid, facile versifier, and at rare
intervals his verses are touched with poetry; but, for the most part,
they are imitative, and no imitation, however brilliant, is a title to
lasting fame. Imitation in itself is no bad sign in a beginner; it is a
healthier symptom than the adoption of methods which are wilfully
eccentric; but it is a provisional device, to be used solely as a means
of attaining one’s originality. It cannot be said that Cervantes ever
acquired a personal manner in verse: if he had, there would be far
less division of opinion as to whether he is, or is not, the author of
such and such poems. He finally acquired a personal manner in
prose, but only after an arduous probation.
There are few traces of originality in his earliest prose work, the
First Part of La Galatea, the pastoral which Cervantes never found
time to finish during more than thirty years. I do not think we need
suppose that we have lost a masterpiece, though no doubt it would
be profoundly interesting to see Cervantes trying to pour new wine
into old bottles. The sole interest of the Galatea, as we have it, is
that it is the first essay in fiction of a great creator who has mistaken
his road. There does appear to have existed, long before the
composition of the Homeric poems, a primitive pastoral which was
popular in character. So historians tell us, and no doubt they are
right. But the extant pastoral poetry of Sicily is the latest
manifestation of Greek genius, an artistic revolt against the banal
conventions of civilisation, an attempt to express a longing for a
freer life in a purer air. In other words it is an artificial product. The
Virgilian eclogues are still more remote from reality than the idyls of
Theocritus: as imitations are bound to be. Artificiality is even more
pronounced in the Arcadia of Sannazaro who ‘prosified’ the Virgilian
eclogue during the late Renaissance: what else do you expect in an
imitation of an imitation? Neither in Sannazaro, nor in his disciple
Cervantes, is there a glimpse of real shepherds, nor even of the
Theocritean shepherds,—
Such as sat listening round Apollo’s pipe,
When the great deity, for earth too ripe,
Let his divinity o’erflowing die
In music, through the vales of Thessaly.
What we find in the Galatea is the imitation by Cervantes of
Sannazaro’s prose imitation of Virgil’s imitation of Theocritus. To us
who wish for nothing better than to read Cervantes himself, his
ambition to write like somebody else seems misplaced, not to say
grotesque. But then, for most of us, Sannazaro has only a relative
importance: to Cervantes, Sannazaro was almost Virgil’s peer.
Everything connected with the Galatea is imitative—the impulse to
write it, the matter, and the manner. The Galatea is no spontaneous
product of the author’s fancy; it owes its existence to Sannazaro’s
Arcadia, and to the early Spanish imitations of the Arcadia recorded
in Professor Rennert’s exhaustive monograph. We shall not be far
wrong in thinking that it might never have struggled into print, had
not Cervantes been encouraged by the example of his friend Luis
Gálvez de Montalvo, who had made a hit with El Pastor de Fílida. So,
too, as regards the matter of the Galatea. The sixth book is a frank
adaptation of the Arcadia; there are further reminiscences of
Sannazaro’s pastoral in both the verse and the prose of the Galatea;
other allusions are worked in without much regard to their
appropriateness; León Hebreo is not too lofty, nor Alonso Pérez too
lowly, to escape Cervantes’s depredations. Lastly, the manner is no
less imitative: construction, arrangement, distribution, diction are all
according to precedent. Martínez Marina, indeed, held the odd view
that there was something new in the style of the Galatea, and that
Cervantes and Mariana were the first to move down the steep slope
that leads to culteranismo. During the hundred years that Martínez
Marina’s theory has been before the world it has made no converts,
and therefore it needs no refutation. But, though the theory is
mistaken, some of the facts advanced to support it are indubitable:
the Galatea is deliberately latinised in imitation of Sannazaro who
sought to reproduce the sustained and sonorous melody of the
Ciceronian period. So intent is Cervantes upon the model that his
own personality is overwhelmed. He probably never wrote with more
scrupulous care than when at work on the Galatea, yet all his pains
and all his elaborate finish are so much labour lost. Briefly, the
Galatea is little more than the echo of an echo, and the individual
quality of Cervantes’s voice is lost amid the reverberations of exotic
music.
The sixteenth-century prose-pastoral was a barren product, rooted
in a false convention. It was not natural, and it was not artistic: it
failed to reproduce the beauty of the old ideal, and it failed to create
a modern ideal. It satisfies no canon, and to attempt to make a case
for it is to argue for argument’s sake. Had Cervantes continued to
work this vein, he would never have found his true path, and must
have remained an imitator till the end; and it is a mere chance that
he did not return to the pastoral and complete the Galatea. It was
far too often in his thoughts. As his butt Feliciano de Silva would
have said, his reason saw ‘the unreason of the reason with which
the reason is afflicted’ when given up to the composition of
pastorals; and yet the pastoral romance had a fascination for him.
Fortunately, he was saved from a fatal error by the fact that, for
nearly twenty years after the publication of the Galatea, he was kept
against his will in touch with the realities of life: realities often grim,
squalid, fantastic, cruel and absurd, but preferable to the pointless
philanderings of imaginary swains and nymphs in a pasteboard
Arcadia. The surly taxpayers from whom Cervantes had to wring
contributions, the clergy who excommunicated and imprisoned him,
the alcaldes and jacks-in-office who made his life a burden, the
cheating landlords and strumpets whom he met in miserable inns—
these people were not the crown and flower of the human race, but
they were not intangible abstractions, nor even persistent bores;
they were plain men and women, creatures of flesh and blood,
subject to all the passions of humanity, and using vigorous, natural
speech instead of euphemisms and preciosities. It was by contact
with these rugged folk that Cervantes amassed his wealth of
observation, and slowly learned his trade. This was precisely what he
needed. After his return from Algiers, and till his marriage,
circumstances had thrown him into a literary clique, well-read and
well-meaning, but with no vital knowledge of the past and no
intellectual interest in the present. The destiny which drove
Cervantes to collect provisions and taxes in the villages of the south
saved him from the Byzantinism of the capital, and placed him once
more in direct relation with nature—especially human nature. This
was his salvation as an author. And eighteen years later he produced
the First Part of Don Quixote.
It would be interesting to know the exact stages of composition of
Don Quixote, but that is hopeless. We cannot be sure as to when
Cervantes began the book, but we may hazard a conjecture.
Bernardo de la Vega’s Pastor de Iberia, one of the books in Don
Quixote’s library, was published in 1591, and this goes to prove that
the sixth chapter was written after this date—probably a good deal
later, for this pastoral was a failure, and therefore not likely to come
at once into the hands of a busy, roving tax-gatherer. You all
remember the incident of Sancho Panza’s being tossed in a blanket,
and there is a very similar episode in the Third Book of Guzmán de
Alfarache. Is there any relation between the two? Is it a case of
unconscious reminiscence, or is it simple coincidence? It would be
absurd to suppose that Cervantes deliberately took such a trifling
incident from a book published six years before his own. Where
Cervantes is imitative is in the dedication of the First Part of Don
Quixote, which is pieced together from Herrera’s dedication of his
edition of Garcilaso to the Marqués de Ayamonte, and from Francisco
de Medina’s prologue to the same edition. If the tossing of Sancho