# Don Quixote (Cervantes/Ormsby)/Volume 1/Cervantes

CERVANTES.
Four generations had laughed over "Don Quixote" before it occurred to any one to ask, who and what manner of man was this Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra whose name is on the titlepage; and it was too late for a satisfactory answer to the question when it was proposed to add a life of the author to the London edition published at Lord Carteret's instance in 1738. All traces of the personality of Cervantes had by that time disappeared. Any floating traditions that may once have existed, transmitted from men who had known him, had long since died out, and of other record there was none; for the ​sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were incurious as to "the men of the time," a reproach against which the nineteenth has, at any rate, secured itself, if it has produced no Shakespeare or Cervantes. All that Mayans y Siscar, to whom the task was intrusted, or any of those who followed him, Rios, Pellicer, or Navarrete, could do was to eke out the few allusions Cervantes makes to himself in his various prefaces with such pieces of documentary evidence bearing upon his life as they could find.
This, however, has been done by the last-named biographer to such good purpose that, while he has superseded all predecessors, he has left it somewhat more than doubtful whether any successor will ever supersede him. Thoroughness is the chief characteristic of Navarrete's work. Besides sifting, testing, and methodizing with rare patience and judgment what had been previously brought to light, he left, as the saying is, no stone unturned under which anything to illustrate his subject might possibly be found, and all the research of the sixty-five years that have elapsed since the publication of his "Life of Cervantes" has been able to add but little or nothing of importance to the mass of facts he collected and put in order. Navarrete has done all that industry and acumen could do, and it is no fault of his if he has not given us what we want. What Hallam says of Shakespeare may be applied to the almost parallel case of Cervantes: "It is not the register of his baptism, or the draft of his will, or the orthography of his name that we seek; no letter of his writing, no record of his conversation, no character of him drawn with any fulness by a contemporary has been produced." By the irony of fate all or almost all we know of the greatest poet the world has ever seen is contained in documents the most prosaic the art of man can produce, and he who of all the men that ever lived soared highest above this earth is seen to us only as a long-headed man of business, as shrewd and methodical in money matters as the veriest Philistine among us. Of Cervantes we certainly know more than we do of Shakespeare, but of what we know the greater part is derived from sources of the same sort, from formal documents of one kind or another. Here, however, the resemblance ends. In Shakespeare's case the documentary evidence points always to prosperity and success; in the case of Cervantes it tells of difficulties, embarrassments, or struggles.
​It is only natural, therefore, that the biographers of Cervantes, forced to make brick without straw, should have recourse largely to conjecture, and that conjecture should in some instances come by degrees to take the place of established fact. All that I propose to do here is to separate what is matter of fact from what is matter of conjecture, and leave it to the reader's judgment to decide whether the data justify the inference or not.
The men whose names by common consent stand in the front rank of Spanish literature, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Calderon, Garcilaso de la Vega, the Mendozas, Gongora, were all men of ancient families, and, curiously, all, except the last, of families that traced their origin to the same mountain district in the north of Spain. The family of Cervantes is commonly said to have been of Galician origin, and unquestionably it was in possession of lands in Galicia at a very early date; but I think the balance of the evidence tends to show that the "solar," the original site of the family, was at Cervatos in the north-west corner of Old Castile, close to the junction of Castile, Leon, and the Asturias. As it happens, there is a complete history of the Cervantes family from the tenth century down to the seventeenth, extant under the title of "Illustrious Ancestry, Glorious Deeds, and Noble Posterity of the Famous Nuño Alfonso, Alcaide of Toledo," written in 1648 by the industrious genealogist Rodrigo Mendez Silva, who availed himself of a manuscript genealogy by Juan de Mena, the poet laureate and historiographer of John II.
The origin of the name Cervantes is curious. Nuño Alfonso was almost as distinguished in the struggle against the Moors in the reign of Alfonso VII. as the Cid had been half a century before in that of Alfonso VI., and was rewarded by divers grants of land in the neighborhood of Toledo. On one of his acquisitions, about two leagues from the city, he built himself a castle which he called Cervatos, because—so Salazar de Mendoza, in his "Dignidades de Castilla" (1618), gives us to understand—" he was lord of the solar of Servatos in the Montaña," as the mountain region extending from the Basque Provinces to Leon was always called. At his death in battle in 1143, the castle passed by his will to his son Alfonso Munio, who, as territorial or local surnames were then coming into vogue in place of the simple patronymic, took the additional name of Cervatos. His eldest son Pedro succeeded him ​in the possession of the castle, and followed his example in adopting the name, an assumption at which the younger son, Gonzalo, seems to have taken umbrage.
Every one who has paid even a flying visit to Toledo will remember the ruined castle that crowns the hill above the spot where the bridge of Alcantara spans the gorge of the Tagus, and with its broken outline and crumbling walls makes such an admirable pendant to the square solid Alcazar towering over the city roofs on the opposite side. It was built, or as some say restored, by Alfonso VI. shortly after his occupation of Toledo in 1085, and called by him San Servando after a Spanish martyr, a name subsequently modified into San Servan (in which form it appears in the "Poem of the Cid"), San Servantes, and San Cervantes: with regard to which last the "Handbook for Spain" warns its readers against the supposition that it has anything to do with the author of "Don Quixote." Ford, as all know who have taken him for a companion and counsellor on the roads of Spain, is seldom wrong in matters of literature or history. In this instance, however, he is in error. It has everything to do with the author of "Don Quixote," for it is in fact these old walls that have given to Spain the name she is proudest of to-day. Gonzalo, above mentioned, it may be readily conceived, did not relish the appropriation by his brother of a name to which he himself had an equal right, for though nominally taken from the castle, it was in reality derived from the ancient territorial possession of the family; and as a set-off, and to distinguish himself (diferenciarse) from his brother, he took as a surname the name of the castle on the bank of the Tagus, in the building of which, according to a family tradition, his great-grandfather had a share. At the same time, too, in place of the family arms, two stags ("cervato" means a young stag) on a field azure, he took two hinds on a field vert. The story deserves notice, if for no other reason, because it disposes of Conde's ingenious theory that by "Ben-engeli" Cervantes intended an Arabic translation of his own name. Cervantes was as unlikely a man as Scott to be ignorant of his own family history, or to suppose that the name he bore meant "son of the stag."
Both brothers founded families. The Cervatos branch flourished for a considerable time, and held many high offices in Toledo, but, according to Salazar de Mendoza, it had become ​extinct and its possessions had passed into other families in 1618. The Cervantes branch had more tenacity; it sent offshoots in various directions, Andalusia, Estremadura, Galicia, and Portugal, and produced a goodly line of men distinguished in the service of Church and State. Gonzalo himself, and apparently a son of his, followed Ferdinand III. in the great campaign of 1236-48 that gave Cordova and Seville to Christian Spain and penned up the Moors in the kingdom of Granada, and his descendants intermarried with some of the noblest families of the Peninsula and numbered among them soldiers, magistrates, and Church dignitaries, including at least two cardinal archbishops.
Of the line that settled in Andalusia, Diego de Cervantes, Commander of the Order of Santiago, married Juana Avellaneda, daughter of Juan Arias de Saavedra, and had several sons, of whom one was Gonzalo Gomez, Corregidor of Jerez and ancestor of the Mexican and Columbian branches of the family; and another, Juan, whose son Rodrigo married Doña Leonor de Cortinas, and by her had four children, Rodrigo, Andrea, Luisa, and Miguel, the author of "Don Quixote." It is true that documentary evidence is wanting for the absolute identification of Juan the Corregidor of Osuna, whom we know to have been the grandfather of Cervantes, with Juan the son of Diego, but it is not a question that admits of any reasonable doubt. It is difficult to see who else he could have been if the date and circumstances of the case are taken into consideration, or how, unless he was the issue of the marriage with the daughter of Juan de Saavedra, his grandson could have been Cervantes Saavedra; while his name Juan points to his having been the son of Juana and grandson of the two Juans, Cervantes and Saavedra. The pedigree of Cervantes is not without its bearing on "Don Quixote." A man who could look back upon an ancestry of genuine knights-errant extending from well-nigh the time of Pelayo to the siege of Granada was likely to have a strong feeling on the subject of the sham chivalry of the romances. It gives a point, too, to what he says in more than one place about families that have once been great and have tapered away until they have come to nothing, like a pyramid. It was the case of his own.
He was born at Alcalá de Henares, possibly, as his name seems to suggest, on St. Michael's Day, and baptized in the ​church of Santa Maria Mayor on the 9th of October, 1547. Of his boyhood and youth we know nothing, unless it be from the glimpse he gives us in the preface to his "Comedies" of himself as a boy looking on with delight while Lope de Rueda and his company set up their rude plank stage in the plaza and acted the rustic farces which he himself afterwards took
Other things besides the drama were in their infancy when Cervantes was a boy. The period of his boyhood was in every way a transition period for Spain. The old chivalrous Spain had passed away. Its work was done when Granada surrendered. The new Spain was the mightiest power the world had seen since the Roman Empire, and it had not yet been called upon to pay the price of its greatness. By the policy of Ferdinand and Ximenez the sovereign had been made absolute, and the Church and Inquisition adroitly adjusted to keep him so. The nobles, who had always resisted absolutism as strenuously as they had fought the Moors, had been divested of all political power, a like fate had befallen the cities, the free constitutions of Castile and Aragon had been swept away, and the only function that remained to the Cortes was that of granting money at the King's dictation. But the loss of liberty was not felt immediately, for Charles V. was like an accomplished horseman with a firm seat and a light hand, who can manage the steed without fretting it, and make it do his will while he leaves its movements to all appearance free.
The transition extended to literature. Men who, like Garcilaso de la Vega and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, followed the Italian wars, had brought back from Italy the products of the post-Renaissance literature, which took root and flourished and even threatened to extinguish the native growths. Damon and Thyrsis, Phillis and Chloe had been fairly naturalized in Spain, together with all the devices of pastoral poetry for investing with an air of novelty the idea of a despairing shepherd and inflexible shepherdess. Sannazaro's "Arcadia" ​had introduced the taste for prose pastorals, which soon bore fruit in Montemayor's "Diana" and its successors; and as for the sonnet, it was spreading like the rabbit in Australia. As a set-off against this, the old historical and traditional ballads, and the true pastorals, the songs and ballads of peasant life, were being collected assiduously and printed in the cancioneros that succeeded one another with increasing rapidity. But the most notable consequence, perhaps, of the spread of printing was the flood of romances of chivalry that had continued to pour from the press ever since Garci Ordoñez de Montalvo had resuscitated "Amadis of Gaul" at the beginning of the century.
For a youth fond of reading, solid or light, there could have been no better spot in Spain than Alcalá de Henares in the middle of the sixteenth century. It was then a busy, populous university town, something more than the enterprising rival of Salamanca, and altogether a very different place from the melancholy, silent, deserted Alcalá the traveller sees now as he goes from Madrid to Saragossa. Theology and medicine may have been the strong points of the university, but the town itself seems to have inclined rather to the humanities and light literature, and as a producer of books Alcalá was already beginning to compete with the older presses of Toledo, Burgos, Salamanca, and Seville.
A pendant to the picture Cervantes has given us of his first playgoings might, no doubt, have been often seen in the street of Alcalá at that time; a bright, eager, tawny-haired boy peering into a bookshop where the latest volumes lay open to tempt the public, wondering, it may be, what that little book with the woodcut of the blind beggar and his boy, that called itself "Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, segunda impresion," could be about; or with eyes brimming over with merriment gazing at one of those preposterous portraits of a knight-errant in outrageous panoply and plumes with which the publishers of chivalry romances loved to embellish the titlepages of their folios. He had seen the Emperor's German ritters many a time, but they were slim pages in satin compared with this. What fun it would be to see such a figure come charging into the plaza! How he'd frighten the old women and scatter the turkeys! If the boy was the father of the man, the sense of the incongruous that was strong at fifty was lively at ten, and some such reflections as these may have been the true genesis of "Don Quixote."
​For his more solid education, we are told, he went to Salamanca. But why Rodrigo de Cervantes, who was very poor, should have sent his son to a university a hundred and fifty miles away when he had one at his own door, would be a puzzle, if we had any reason for supposing that he did so. The only evidence is a vague statement by Professor Tomas Gonzalez, that he once saw an old entry of the matriculation of a Miguel de Cervantes. This does not appear to have been ever seen again; but even if it had, and if the date corresponded, it would prove nothing, as there were at least two other Miguels born about the middle of the century; one of them, moreover, a Cervantes Saavedra, a cousin, no doubt, who was a source of great embarassment to the biographers.
That he was a student neither at Salamanca nor at Alcala is best proved by his own works. No man drew more largely upon experience than he did, and he has nowhere left a single reminiscence of student life—for the "Tia Fingida," if it be his, is not one—nothing, not even "a college joke," to show that he remembered days that most men remember best. All that we know positively about his education is that Juan Lopez de Hoyos, a professor of humanities and belles-lettres of some eminence, calls him his "dear and beloved pupil." This was in a little collection of verses by different hands on the death of Isabel de Valois, second queen of Philip II., published by the professor in 1569, to which Cervantes contributed four pieces, including an elegy, and an epitaph in the form of a sonnet. It is only by a rare chance that a "Lycidas" finds its way into a volume of this sort, and Cervantes was no Milton. His verses are no worse than such things usually are; so much, at least, may be said for them.
By the time the book appeared he had left Spain, and, as fate ordered it, for twelve years, the most eventful ones of his life. Giulio, afterwards Cardinal, Aequaviva had been sent at the end of 1568 to Philip II. by the Pope on a mission, partly of condolence, partly political, and on his return to Home, which was somewhat brusquely expedited by the King, he took Cervantes with him as his camerero (chamberlain), the office he himself held in the Pope's household. The post would no doubt have led to advancement at the Papal Court had Cervantes retained it, but in the summer of 1570 he resigned it and enlisted as a private soldier in Captain Diego de Urbina's company, belonging to Don Miguel de Moncada's ​regiment, but at that time forming a part of the command of Marc Antony Colonna. What impelled him to this step we know not, whether it was distaste for the career before him, or purely military enthusiasm. It may well have been the latter, for it was a stirring time; the events, however, which led to the alliance between Spain, Venice, and the Pope, against the common enemy, the Porte, and to the victory of the combined fleets at Lepanto, belong rather to the history of Europe than to the life of Cervantes. He was one of those that sailed from Messina, in September 1571, under the command of Don John of Austria; but on the morning of the 7th of October, when the Turkish fleet was sighted, he was lying below ill with fever. At the news that the enemy was in sight he rose, and, in spite of the remonstrances of his comrades and superiors, insisted on taking his post, saying he preferred death in the service of God and the King to health. His galley, the Marquesa, was in the thick of the fight, and before it was over he had received three gunshot wounds, two in the breast and one in the left hand or arm. On the morning after the battle, according to Navarrete, he had an interview with the commander-in-chief, Don John, who was making a personal inspection of the wounded, one result of which was an addition of three crowns to his pay, and another, apparently, the friendship of his general. Strada says of Don John that he knew personally every soldier under his command, but at any rate it was as much for his friendly bearing and solicitude for their comfort and well-being as for his abilities and gallantry in the field that he was beloved by his men, and it is easy to conceive that he should have taken a special interest in the case of Cervantes, who, it may be observed, was exactly his own age, and curiously enough—though it is not very likely Don John was aware of the fact—his kinsman in a remote degree, inasmuch as the mother of Ferdinand of Aragon was a descendant of Nuño Alfonso above mentioned.
How severely Cervantes was wounded may be inferred from the fact, that with youth, a vigorous frame, and as cheerful and buoyant a temperament as ever invalid had, he was seven months in hospital at Messina before he was discharged. He came out with his left hand permanently disabled; he had lost the use of it, as Mercury told him in the "Viaje del Parnaso," for the greater glory of the right. This, however, did not absolutely unfit him for service, and in April 1572 he ​joined Manuel Ponce de Leon's company of Lope de Figneroa's regiment, in which, it seems probable, his brother Rodrigo was serving, and shared in the operations of the next three years, including the capture of the Goletta and Tunis. Taking advantage of the lull which followed the recapture of these places by the Turks, he obtained leave to return to Spain, and sailed from Naples in September 1575 on board the Sun galley, in company with his brother Rodrigo, Pedro Carillo de Quesada, late Governor of the Goletta, and some others, and furnished with letters from Don John of Austria and the Duke of Sesa, the Viceroy of Sicily, recommending him to the King for the command of a company, on account of his services; a dono infelice as events proved. On the 26th they fell in with a squadron of Algerine galleys, and after a stout resistance were overpowered and carried into Algiers.
It is not easy to resist the temptation to linger over the story of Cervantes' captivity in Algiers, for in truth a more wonderful story has seldom been told. Alexandre Dumas could hardly have invented so marvellous a series of adventures, and certainly would have hesitated before he asked even romance readers to accept anything so improbable. Nevertheless, incredible as the tale may seem, there is evidence for every particular that scepticism itself will not venture to call in question. At the distribution of the captives, Cervantes fell to the share of one Ali or Dali Mami, the rais or captain of one of the galleys, and a renegade, as were almost all embarked in the trade; for a trade the capture of Christians had now become, as Cervantes implies in the title of the "Trato de Argel." The Turks, to supply the demand for rowers, dockyard laborers, and the like, for their great Mediterranean fleet, had long been in the habit of kidnapping, either by making descents upon the coasts, or seizing the crews of vessels at sea. Moved by the sufferings of the unhappy victims, noble-minded men of various religious orders in Spain devoted themselves to the work of negotiating the release of as many as it was possible to ransom, acting as intermediaries between the captors and the friends of the captives, making up the sums required out of the funds contributed by the charitable, and even, as Cervantes himself says in the "Trato de Argel" and the novel of the "Española Inglesa," surrendering themselves as hostages when the money was not immediately forthcoming. It seems strange that a proud and powerful nation ​should have submitted to this; and stranger still that Philip should have condescended to countenance negotiations of the sort, and formally recognize the Redemptorist Fathers as his agents, when probably a tenth of the force he was employing to stamp out heresy among his Flemish subjects would have sufficed to destroy the nest of pirates that was the centre of the trade. To this pass had "one-man power" already brought Spain in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. As is unhappily often the case with philanthropic efforts, the exertions of the good Redemptorist Fathers aggravated the evil. They supplied an additional motive for capturing Christians by affording facilities for converting captives into cash, and by making them valuable as property added to their misery.
By means of a ransomed fellow-captive the brothers contrived to inform their family of their condition, and the poor people at Alcalá at once strove to raise the ransom money, the father disposing of all he possessed, and the two sisters giving up their marriage portions. But Dali Mami had found on Cervantes the letters addressed to the King by Don John and the Duke of Sesa, and, concluding that his prize must be a person of great consequence, when the money came he refused it scornfully as being altogether insufficient. The owner of Rodrigo, however, was more easily satisfied; ransom was accepted in his case, and it was arranged between the brothers that he should return to Spain and procure a vessel in which he was to come back to Algiers and take off Miguel and as many of their comrades as possible. This was not the first attempt to escape that Cervantes had made. Soon after the commencement of his captivity he induced several of his companions to join him in trying to reach Oran, then a Spanish post, on foot; but after the first day's journey, the Moor who had agreed to act as their guide deserted them, and they had no choice but to return. The second attempt was more disastrous. In a garden outside the city on the seashore, he constructed, with the help of the gardener, a Spaniard, a hiding-place, to which he brought, one by one, fourteen of his fellow-captives, keeping them there in secrecy for several months, and supplying them with food through a renegade known as El Dorador, "the Gilder." How he, a captive himself, contrived to do all this, is one of the mysteries of the story. Wild as the project may appear, it was very nearly successful. The vessel procured by Rodrigo made its ​appearance off the coast, and under cover of night was proceeding to take off the refugees, when the crew were alarmed by a passing fishing boat, and beat a hasty retreat. On renewing the attempt shortly afterwards, they, or a portion of them at least, were taken prisoners, and just as the poor fellows in the garden were exulting in the thought that in a few moments more freedom would be within their grasp, they found themselves surrounded by Turkish troops, horse and foot. The Dorador had revealed the whole scene to the Dey Hassan.
When Cervantes saw what had befallen them, he charged his companions to lay all the blame upon him, and as they were being bound he declared aloud that the whole plot was of his contriving, and that nobody else had any share in it. Brought before the Dey, he said the same. He was threatened with impalement and with torture; and as cutting off ears and noses were playful freaks with the Algerines, it may be conceived what their tortures were like; but nothing could make him swerve from his original statement that he and he alone was responsible. The upshot was that the unhappy gardener was hanged by his master, and the prisoners taken possession of by the Dey, who, however, afterwards restored most of them to their masters, but kept Cervantes, paying Dali Mami 500 crowns for him. He felt, no doubt, that a man of such resource, enegy, and daring, was too dangerous a piece of property to be left in private hands; and he had him heavily ironed and lodged in his own prison. If he thought that by these means he could break the spirit or shake the resolution of his prisoner, he was soon undeceived, for Cervantes contrived before long to despatch a letter to the Governor of Oran, entreating him to send him some one that could be trusted, to enable him and three other gentlemen, fellow-captives of his, to make their escape; intending evidently to renew his first attempt with a more trustworthy guide. Unfortunately the Moor who carried the letter was stopped just outside Oran, and the letter being found upon him, he was sent back to Algiers, where by the order of the Dey he was promptly impaled as a warning to others, while Cervantes was condemned to receive two thousand blows of the stick, a number which most likely would have deprived the world of "Don Quixote," had not some persons, who they were we know not, interceded on his behalf.
​After this he seems to have been kept in still closer confinement than before, for nearly two years passed before he made another attempt. This time his plan was to purchase, by the aid of a Spanish renegade and two Valencian merchants, resident in Algiers, an armed vessel in which he and about sixty of the leading captives were to make their escape; but just as they were about to put it into execution, one Doctor Juan Blanco de Paz, an ecclesiastic and a compatriot, informed the Dey of the plot. The Dorador, who had betrayed him on the former occasion, was a poor creature, influenced probably by fear of the consequences, but Blanco de Paz was a scoundrel of deeper dye. Cervantes by force of character, by his self-devotion, by his untiring energy and his exertions to lighten the lot of his companions in misery, had endeared himself to all, and become the leading spirit in the captive colony, and, incredible as it may seem, jealousy of his influence and the esteem in which he was held, moved this man to compass his destruction by a cruel death. The merchants, finding that the Dey knew all, and fearing that Cervantes under torture might make disclosures that would imperil their own lives, tried to persuade him to slip away on board a vessel that was on the point of sailing for Spain; but he told them they had nothing to fear, for no tortures would make him compromise anybody, and he went at once and gave himself up to the Dey.
As before, the Dey tried to force him to name his accomplices. Everything was made ready for his immediate execution; the halter was put round his neck and his hands tied behind him, but all that could be got from him was that he himself, with the help of four gentlemen who had since left Algiers, had arranged the whole, and that the sixty who were to accompany him were not to know anything of it until the last moment. Finding he could make nothing of him, the Dey sent him back to prison more heavily ironed than before. But bold as these projects were, they were surpassed in daring by a plot to bring about a revolt of all the Christians in Algiers, twenty or twenty-five thousand in number, overpower the Turks, and seize the city. Of the details of his plan we know nothing; all we know is that at least two of those in his confidence believed it would have been successful had it not been for the treachery of some persons in the secret; and certain it is that the Dey Hassan stood in awe of Cervantes, and ​used to say that so long as he kept tight hold of the crippled Spaniard, his captives, his ships, and his city were safe. What was it, then, that made him hold his hand in his paroxysms of rage? When it was so easy to relieve himself of all the trouble and anxiety his prisoner caused him, what was it that restrained him? It may be said it was the admiration he felt at the noble bearing, dauntless courage, and self-devotion of the man, that made him merciful. But is it likely that the fiend Haedo and Cervantes describe, who hanged, impaled, and cut off ears every day, for the mere pleasure of doing it—who most likely had, like his friend the Arnaut Mami, "a house filled with noseless Christians"—would have been influenced by any such feeling? There are, we know, men who seem to bear a charmed life among savages, and to exercise some mysterious power over the savage mind; but the Dey Hassan was no savage; he was worse. With all respect for the Haedos, uncle and nephew, and their chief informant Doctor de Sosa, it would be hard to avoid a suspicion that they had exaggerated, were it not that the story they tell is confirmed in every particular by a formally attested document discovered in 1808 by Cean Bermudez, acting on a suggestion of Navarrete's, in the Archivo General de Indias at Seville.
The poverty-stricken Cervantes family had been all this time trying once more to raise the ransom money, and at last a sum of three hundred ducats was got together and intrusted to the Redemptorist Father Juan Gil, who was about to sail for Algiers. The Dey, however, demanded more than double the sum offered, and as his term of office had expired and he was about to sail for Constantinople, taking all his slaves with him, the case of Cervantes was critical. He was already on board heavily ironed, when the Dey at length agreed to reduce his demand by one-half, and Father Gil by borrowing was able to make up the amount, and on September 19, 1580, after a captivity of five years all but a week, Cervantes was at last set free. Before long he discovered that Blanco de Paz, who claimed to be an officer of the Inquisition, was now concocting on false evidence a charge of misconduct to be brought against him on his return to Spain. To checkmate him Cervantes drew up a series of twenty-five questions, covering the whole period of his captivity, upon which he requested Father Gil to take the depositions of credible witnesses before a notary. Eleven witnesses taken from among the principal captives in ​Algiers deposed to all the facts above stated (except of course the intended seizure of the city, which was too compromising a matter to be referred to), and to a great deal more besides. There is something touching in the admiration, love, and gratitude we see struggling to find expression in the formal language of the notary, as they testify one after another to the good deeds of Cervantes, how he comforted and helped the weak-hearted, how he kept up their drooping courage, how he shared his poor purse with this deponent, and how "in him this deponent found father and mother."
On his return to Spain he found his old regiment about to march for Portugal to support Philip's claim to the crown, and utterly penniless now, had no choice but to rejoin it. He was in the expeditions to the Azores in 1582 and the following year, and on the conclusion of the war returned to Spain in the autumn of 1583, bringing with him the manuscript of his pastoral romance, the "Galatea," and probably also, to judge by internal evidence, that of the first portion of "Persiles and Sigismunda." He also brought back with him, his biographers assert, an infant daughter, the offspring of an amour, as some of them with great circumstantiality inform us, with a Lisbon lady of noble birth, whose name, however, as well as that of the street she lived in, they omit to mention. The sole foundation for all this is that in 1605 there certainly was living in the family of Cervantes a Dona Isabel de Saavedra, who is described in an official document as his natural daughter, and then twenty years of age. This is all we know about her, unless she is to be identified with the sister Isabel who in 1614 took the veil in the convent in which he himself was afterwards buried.
With his crippled left hand promotion in the army was hopeless, now that Don John was dead and he had no one to press his claims and services, and for a man drawing on to forty life in the ranks was a dismal prospect; he had already a certain reputation as a poet; Luis Galvez de Montalvo had mentioned him as a distinguished one in the "Pastor de Filida" in 1582, and we know from Doctor de Sosa, one of the witnesses examined at Algiers, that he used to beguile his imprisonment with poetry; he made up his mind, therefore, to cast his lot with literature, and for a first venture committed his "Galatea" to the press. It was published, as Salvá y Mallen shows conclusively, at Alcalá, his own birthplace, in 1585, ​not at Madrid in 1584 as his biographers and bibliographers all say, and no doubt helped to make his name more widely known, but certainly did not do him much good in any other way.
While it was going through the press, he married Doña Catalina de Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano, a lady of Esquivias near Madrid, and apparently a friend of the family, who brought him a fortune which may possibly have served to keep the wolf from the door, but if so, that was all. The drama had by this time outgrown market-place stages and strolling companies, and with his old love for it he naturally turned to it for a congenial employment. In about three years he wrote twenty or thirty plays, which he tells us were performed without any throwing of cucumbers or other missiles, and ran their course without any hisses, outcries, or disturbance. In other words, his plays were not bad enough to be hissed off the stage, but not good enough to hold their own upon it. Only two of them have been preserved, but as they happen to be two of the seven or eight he mentions with complacency, we may assume they are favorable specimens, and no one who reads the "Numancia" and the "Trato de Argel" will feel any surprise that they failed as acting dramas. Whatever merits they may have, whatever occasional power they may show, they are, as regards construction, incurably clumsy. How completely they failed is manifest from the fact that with all his sanguine temperament and indomitable perseverance he was unable to maintain the struggle to gain a livelihood as a dramatist for more than three years; nor was the rising popularity of Lope the cause, as is often said, notwithstanding his own words to the contrary. When Lope began to write for the stage is uncertain, but it was certainly after Cervantes went to Seville.
This, according to Navarrete, was in 1588, but the "Nuevos Documentos" published by Don Jose Asensio y Toledo in 1864 show that it must have been early in 1587. His first employment seems to have been under Diego de Valdivia, a judge of the Audiencia Real, but at the beginning of 1588 he was appointed one of four deputy purveyors under Antonio de Guevara, purveyor-general to that "fleet of the Indies" known to history as the Invincible Armada. It was no doubt an irksome and ill-paid office, for in 1590 he addressed a memorial to the King, setting forth his services and petitioning for ​an appointment to one of three or four posts then vacant in the Spanish possessions across the Atlantic, an application which, fortunately for the world, was "referred," it would seem, to some official in the Indies Office at Seville, and being shelved, so remained until it was discovered among the documents brought to light by Cean Bermudez.
Among the "Nuevos Documentos" printed by Señor Asensio y Toledo is one dated 1592, and curiously characteristic of Cervantes. It is an agreement with one Rodrigo Osorio, a manager, who was to accept six comedies at fifty ducats (about 6/.) apiece, not to be paid in any case unless it appeared on representation that the said comedy was one of the best that had ever been represented in Spain. The test does not seem to have been ever applied; perhaps it was sufficiently apparent to Rodrigo Osorio that the comedies were not among the best that had ever been represented. Among the correspondence of Cervantes there might have been found, no doubt, more than one letter like that we see in the "Rake's Progress," "Sir, I have read your play, and it will not doo."
He was more successful in a literary contest at Saragossa in 1595 in honor of the canonization of St. Jacinto, when his composition won the first prize, three silver spoons. The year before this he had been appointed a collector of revenues for the kingdom of Granada, a better post probably than his first, but certainly a more responsible one, as he found in the end to his cost. In order to remit the money he had collected more conveniently to the treasury, he intrusted it to a merchant, who failed and absconded; and as the bankrupt's assets were insufficient to cover the whole, he was sent to prison at Seville in September 1597. The balance against him, however, was a small one, about 26/., and on giving security for it he was released at the end of the year. It was as he journeyed from town to town collecting the king's taxes, that he noted down those bits of inn and wayside life and character that abound in the pages of "Don Quixote:" the Benedictine monks with spectacles and sunshades, mounted on their tall mules; the strollers in costume bound for the next village; the barber with his basin on his head, on his way to bleed a patient; the recruit with his breeches in his bundle, tramping along the road singing; the reapers gathered in the venta gateway listening to "Felixmarte de Hircania" read out to them; and those little Hogarthian touches that lie so well ​knew how to bring in, the ox-tail hanging up with the landlord's comb stuck in it, the wine-skins at the bed-head, and those notable examples of hostelry art, Helen going off in high spirits on Paris's arm, and Dido on the tower dropping tears as big as walnuts. Nay, it may well be that on those journeys into remote regions he came across now and then a specimen of the pauper gentleman, with his lean hack and his greyhound and his books of chivalry, dreaming away his life in happy ignorance that the world had changed since his great-grandfather's old helmet was new. But it was in Seville that he found out his true vocation, though he himself would not by any means have admitted it to be so. It was there, in the Triana, that he was first tempted to try his hand at drawing from life, and first brought his humor into play in the exquisite little sketch of "Rinconete y Cortadillo," the germ, in more ways than one, of "Don Quixote."
Where and when that was written, we cannot tell. After his imprisonment all trace of Cervantes in his official capacity disappears, from which it may be inferred that he was not reinstated. That he was still in Seville in November 1598 appears from a satirical sonnet of his on the elaborate catafalque erected to testify the grief of the city at the death of Philip II., but from this up to 1603 we have no clew to his movements. The words in the preface to the First Part of "Don Quixote" are generally held to be conclusive that he conceived the idea of the book, and wrote the beginning of it at least, in a prison, and that he may have done so is extremely likely. At the same time it should be borne in mind that they contain no assertion to that effect, and may mean nothing more than that this brain-child of his was begotten under circumstances as depressing as prison life. If we accept them literally, the prison may very well have been that in which he was confined for nearly three months at Seville.
The story of his having been imprisoned afterwards at Argamasilla de Alba rests entirely on local tradition. That Argamasilla is Don Quixote's village does not admit of a doubt. Even if Cervantes himself had not owned it by making the Academicians of Argamasilla write verses in honor of Don Quixote, there is no other town or village in La Mancha, except perhaps its near neighbor Tomelloso, the relative position of which to the field of Montiel, the high road to Seville, Puerto Lapice, and the Sierra Morena, agrees with the narrative; and ​we know by Quevedo's burlesque ballad on Don Quixote's Testament that in 1608 it was already famous as Don Quixote's town. Also that Cervantes had a grudge of some kind against the town seems likely from his having "no desire to call its name to mind," and from the banter about the Academicians. It would be uncritical to reject the story absolutely because it depends on local tradition, at the same time it needs very little insight into mythology to see how easily the legend might have grown up under the circumstances.
The cause of the imprisonment is variously stated. It is attributed to a dispute about tithes due to the Priory of St. John which Cervantes had to collect, to a squabble about water rights, to "a stinging jest" of his, to a love affair with the daughter of a hidalgo, whose portrait, Avith that of his daughter, hangs in the village church, and who is conjectured from the inscription upon it to have been the original of Don Quixote. But whatever the cause, the Argamasillans are all agreed that the prison was the arched cellar under the Casa de Medrano, and the late J. E. Hartzenbusch was so far impressed by the tradition that he had two editions of "Don Quixote" printed there, the charming little Elzevir edited by him in 1863, and the four volumes containing the novel in the twelve-volume edition of Cervantes' works completed in 1865.
The books mentioned in Chap. vi. (e.g., the "Pastor de Iberia," printed in 1591) and the adventure of the dead body in Chap. xx., which is obviously based upon an actual occurrence that made some noise in the South of Spain about the year 1593, limit the time within which the First Part can have been written, and it was licensed for the press in September 1604. But it is plain the book had circulated in manuscript to some extent before this, for in the "Picara Justina," which was licensed in August 1604, there are some verses in which Justina speaks of herself as more famous than Don Quixote, Celestina, Lazarillo, or Guzman de Alfarache, so that more than four months before it had been printed we have "Don Quixote" ranked with the three most famous fictions of Spain. Nor is this all. In a letter which is extant, dated August 1604, Lope de Vega says that of the rising poets "there is not one so bad as Cervantes or so silly as to write in praise of 'Don Quixote;'" and in another passage that satire is "as odious to him as his comedies are to Cervantes"—evidently alluding to the dramatic criticism in Chap, xlviii.
​There is a tradition that Cervantes read some portions of his work to a select audience at the Duke of Bejar's, which may have helped to make the book known; but the obvious conclusion is that the First Part of "Don Quixote" lay on his hands some time before he could find a publisher bold enough to undertake a venture of so novel a character; and so little faith in it had Francisco Robles of Madrid, to whom at last he sold it, that he did not care to incur the expense of securing the copyright for Aragon or Portugal, contenting himself with that for Castile. The printing was finished in December, and the book came out with the new year, 1605. It is often said that "Don Quixote" was at first received coldly. The facts show just the contrary. No sooner was it in the hands of the public than preparations were made to issue pirated editions at Lisbon and Valencia, and to protect his property Robles had to bring out a second edition with the additional copyrights for Aragon and Portugal, which he secured in February. But two Lisbon publishers were in the field with editions almost, if not quite, as soon as he was, and if he lost the whole or a good part of his royalties on the copies sold in Portugal, no one, I imagine, will feel much pity for him. He was in time, however, to secure his rights in Valencia, where in the course of the summer an authorized edition appeared, but not two, as Salvá y Mallen, Gallardo, and others say, for the differences they rely on are mere variations of copies of the same edition. There were, in fact, five editions within the year, and in less than three years' time these were exhausted.
No doubt it was received with something more than coldness by certain sections of the community. Men of wit, taste, and discrimination among the aristocracy gave it a hearty welcome, but the aristocracy in general were not likely to relish a book that turned their favorite reading into ridicule and laughed at so many of their favorite ideas, and Lope's letter above quoted expresses beyond a doubt the feeling of the literary class with a few exceptions. The dramatists who gathered round Lope as their leader regarded Cervantes as their common enemy, and it is plain that he was equally obnoxious to the other clique, the culto poets who had Gongora for their chief. Navarrete, who knew nothing of the letter above mentioned, tries hard to show that the relations between Cervantes and Lope Avere of a very friendly sort, as indeed ​they were until "Don Quixote" was written. The first public praise Lope ever got was from Cervantes in the "Galatea;" and when he published his "Dragontea" in 1598 Cervantes wrote for it a not ungraceful sonnet upon that "fertile Vega that every day offers us fresh fruits;" and Lope on his part mentioned Cervantes in a complimentary way in the "Arcadia."
But Cervantes' criticism on the drama of the new school, though in truth it amounts to no more than Lope himself admitted in 1602 in the "New Art of Comedy Writing," seems to have changed all this. Cervantes, indeed, to the last generously and manfully declared his admiration of Lope's powers, his unfailing invention, and his marvellous fertility; but in the preface to the First Part of "Don Quixote" and in the verses of "Urganda the Unknown," and one or two other places, there are, if we read between the lines, sly hits at Lope's vanities and affectations that argue no personal good-will; and Lope openly sneers at "Don Quixote" and Cervantes, and fourteen years after his death gives him only a few lines of cold commonplace in the "Laurel de Apolo," that seem all the colder for the eulogies of a host of nonentities whose names are found nowhere else.
There was little in the First Part of "Don Quixote" to give offence to Gongora and his school, but no doubt instinct told them that the man who wrote it was no friend of theirs (as was abundantly proved when the Second Part came out), and they showed their animus almost immediately. There were great rejoicings at Valladolid in the spring of 1605, on the occasion of the baptism of the prince, afterwards Philip IV., which coincided with the arrival of Lord Howard of Effingham and a numerous retinue to ratify the treaty of peace between England and Spain, and the official "Relacion" of the fete is believed by Pellicer, Navarrete, Hartzenbusch and others to have been written by Cervantes. Thereupon there appeared a sonnet in that bitter trenchant style of which Gongora was such a master, declaring that the sole object of the expenditure and display was to do honor to the heretics and Lutherans, and taunting the authorities with having employed "Don Quixote, Sancho, and his ass" to write an account of their doings. In the opinion of Don Pascual de Gayangos ("Cervantes en Valladolid," Madrid, 1884) the connection of Cervantes with the "Relacion" is doubtful, as it is also that Gongora, to whom ​the sonnet is generally attributed, was really the author. All that can be said is that it is in his manner, and that the reference to the heretics and Lutherans is Gongora all over; if not his it comes from his school, and shows the feeling existing in that quarter towards Cervantes and his work.
In another piece, still more characteristic, he makes an attack on Cervantes which has never been noticed, so far as I am aware. In the ballad beginning "Castillo de San Cervantes" he taunts the old castle on the Tagus, already referred to, with being no longer what it was in the days of its youth when it did such gallant service against the Moors, compares its crumbling battlements to an old man's teeth, and bids it look down and see in the stream below how age has changed it. Depping, who inserts the ballad in his "Romancero," admits that the idea is poetical, but confesses he cannot see the drift of the poet, who seems to him to be here rather a preacher than a poet, and no doubt others have shared his perplexity. It was evidently a recognized gibe to compare Cervantes to the ruined castle that bore his name; Avellaneda, in the scurrilous preface to his continuation of "Don Quixote," jeers at him in precisely the same strain as the ballad, for having grown as old, and being as much the worse for time as the castle of San Cervantes. Gongora, it may be observed, had a special gift of writing pretty, innocent-looking verses charged with venom. Who would take the lines to a mountain brook, beginning—
Whither away, my little river, Why leap down so eagerly, Thou to be lost in the Guadalquivir, The Guadalquivir in the sea?
as guileless apparently as a lyrical ballad of Wordsworth's, to be in reality a bitter satire on the unlucky upstart, Rodrigo Calderon?
Another reason for the enmity of Gongora and his clique to Cervantes may well have been that their arch-enemy Quevedo was a friend of his. Cervantes, indeed, expressly declares his esteem for Quevedo as "the scourge of silly poets." It is a pity that we know so little of the relations of these two men to one another. Quevedo nowhere mentions Cervantes personally, though he shows himself to have been an appreciative reader of "Don Quixote," and Cervantes only twice mentions ​Quevedo. But each time there is something in his words that suggests a close personal intimacy. Thus, in the "Viaje del Parnaso," when Mercury proposes to wait for Quevedo, Cervantes says he "takes such short steps that he will be a whole age coming," a remark which has puzzled a good many readers. The fact is that Quevedo had clubbed feet, but, so far from being sensitive about the deformity, made it a matter of joke. Cervantes, however, could not feel sure that he would relish a joke on the subject from another, had he not been intimate with him, and we know he held with the proverb, "Jests that give pain are no jests."
Quevedo seems to have been the only one among the younger men, except perhaps Juan de Jauregui, with whom Cervantes had any friendship, and even among the men of his own generation his personal friendships appear to have been but few. And yet, so far as the few glimpses we get allow us to judge, Cervantes must have been one of the most lovable men this world has ever seen. The depositions of the witnesses at Algiers, given by Navarrete, show his power of winning the love of his fellow-men. He was a stanch and loyal friend himself, one that could see no fault in a friend, and never missed a chance of saying a kindly word when he thought he could give pleasure to a friend. He bore his hard lot with sweet serenity and noble patience, facing adversity as he had faced death with high courage and dauntless spirit; and surely those two fancy portraits Hartzenbusch has prefixed to his editions are libellous representations. The features of Cervantes never wore that expression of agonized despair. We may rely upon it that it was with the "smooth untroubled forehead and bright cheerful eyes" of his own half-playful description that he met adverse fortune.
In 1601 Valladolid was made the seat of the Court, and at the beginning of 1603 Cervantes had been summoned thither in connection with the balance due by him to the Treasury, which was still outstanding. In what way the matter was settled we know not, but we hear no more of it. He remained at Valladolid, apparently supporting himself by agencies and scrivener's work of some sort; probably draughting petitions and drawing up statements of claims to be presented to the Council, and the like. So, at least, we gather from the depositions taken on the occasion of the death of a gentleman, the victim of a street brawl, who had been carried into the house ​in which he lived. In these he himself is described as a man who wrote and transacted business, and it appears that his household then consisted of his wife, the natural daughter Isabel de Saavedra already mentioned, his sister Andrea, now a widow, her daughter Costanza, a mysterious Magdalena de Sotomayor calling herself his sister, for whom his biographers cannot account, and a servant-maid.
From another document it would seem that the women found employment in needlework for persons in attendance on the Court, and the presumption is, therefore, that when the Court was removed once more to Madrid in 1606, Cervantes and his household followed it; but we have no evidence of his being in Madrid before 1609, when he was living in the Calle de la Magdalena, a street running from the Calle de Atocha to the Calle de Toledo.
Meanwhile "Don Quixote" had been growing in favor, and its author's name was now known beyond the Pyrenees. In 1607 an edition was printed at Brussels. Robles, the Madrid publisher, found it necessary to meet the demand by a third edition, the seventh in all, in 1608. The popularity of the book in Italy was such that a Milan bookseller was led to bring out an edition in 1610; and another was called for in Brussels in 1611. It seemed as if the hope in the motto of Juan de la Cuesta's device on his titlepage was at last about to be realized; and it might naturally have been expected that, with such proofs before him that he had hit the taste of the public, Cervantes would have at once set about redeeming his rather vague promise of a second volume.
But, to all appearance, nothing was farther from his thoughts. He had still by him one or two short tales of the same vintage as those he had inserted in "Don Quixote"—"Rinconete y Cortadillo," above mentioned, the "Amante Liberal," a story like that of the "Captive," inspired by his own experiences, and perhaps the "Celoso Estremeño"—and instead of continuing the adventures of Don Quixote, he set to work to write more of these "novelas exemplares," as he afterwards called them, with a view to making a book of them. Possibly the "Ilustre Fregona," and the "Fuerza de la Sangre," were not written quite so late, but internal evidence shows beyond a doubt that the others, the "Gitanilla," the "Española Inglesa," the "Licenciado Vidriero," the "Dos Doncellas," the ​"Señora Cornelia," the "Casamiento Engañoso," and the "Coloquio de los Perros" were all written between 1606 and 1612.
Whether the "Tia Fingida," which is now generally included in his novels, is the work of Cervantes or not, must be left an open question. No one who has read it in the original would willingly accept it, but disrelish is no reason for summarily rejecting it, and it cannot be denied that the style closely resembles his. There is nothing in the objection that "usted" is never used by Cervantes for "vuestra merced," for its employment in the tale may be due to the transcriber or printer, and of the two MSS. in existence one at least, though certainly not in the handwriting, is of the time of Cervantes, in the opinion of so good a judge as Señor Fernandez-Guerra y Orbe. The novels were published in the summer of 1613, with a dedication to the Conde de Lemos, the Mæcenas of the day, and with one of those chatty confidential prefaces Cervantes was so fond of. In this eight years and a half after the First Part of "Don Quixote" had appeared, we get the first hint of a forthcoming Second Part. "You shall see shortly," he says, "the further exploits of Don Quixote and humors of Sancho Panza." His idea of "shortly" was a somewhat elastic one, for, as we know by the date to Sancho's letter, he had barely one-half of the book completed that time twelvemonth.
The fact was that, to use a popular phrase, he had "many irons in the fire." There was the Second Part of his "Galatea" to be written, his "Persiles" to be finished, he had on his hands his "Semanas del Jardin" and his "Bernardo," of the nature of which we know nothing, and there was the "Viaje del Parnaso" to be got ready for the press. The last, now made accessible to English readers by the admirable translation of Mr. James Y. Gibson, had been, in part at least, written about three years before the novels were printed. Its motive was the commission given by the Conde de Lemos, on his appointment as Viceroy of Naples, to the brothers Argensola to select poets to grace his court, which suggested to Cervantes the idea of a struggle for Parnassus between the good and bad poets; and as he worked it out he passed in review every poet and poetaster in Spain. But it is what he says about himself in it, and in the prose appendix to it, "the Adjunta," that gives it its chief value and interest now, and ​from no other source do we learn so much about him and his writings, and his own estimate of them.
But more than poems, or pastorals, or novels, it was his dramatic ambition that engrossed his thoughts. The same indomitable spirit that kept him from despair in the bagnios of Algiers, and prompted him to attempt the escape of himself and his comrades again and again, made him persevere in spite of failure and discouragement in his efforts to win the ear of the public as a dramatist. The temperament of Cervantes was essentially sanguine. The portrait he draws in the preface to the novels, with the aquiline features, chestnut hair, smooth untroubled forehead, and bright cheerful eyes, is the very portrait of a sanguine man. Nothing that the managers might say could persuade him that the merits of his plays would not be recognized at last if they were only given a fair chance. In the famous forty-eighth chapter of "Don Quixote," in the Adjunta to the "Viaje del Parnaso," in the preface to his comedies, and other places, he shows plainly enough the ambition that lay next his heart. The old soldier of the Spanish Salamis was bent on being the Æschylus of Spain. He was to found a great national drama, based on the true principles of art, that was to be the envy of all nations; he was to drive from the stage the silly, childish plays, the "mirrors of nonsense and models of folly" that were in vogue through the cupidity of the managers and short-sightedness of the authors; he was to correct and educate the public taste until it was ripe for tragedies on the model of the Greek drama—like the "Numancia" for instance—and comedies that would not only amuse but improve and instruct. All this he was to do, could he once get a hearing: there was the initial difficulty.
He shows plainly enough, too, that "Don Quixote" and the demolition of the chivalry romances was not the work that lay next his heart. He was, indeed, as he says himself in his preface, more a stepfather than a father to "Don Quixote." Never was great work so neglected by its author. That it was written carelessly, hastily, and by fits and starts, was not always his fault, but it seems clear he never read what he sent to the press. He knew how the printers had blundered, but he never took the trouble to correct them when the third edition was in progress, as a man who really cared for the child of his brain would have done. He appears ​to have regarded the book as little more than a mere "libro de entretenimiento," an amusing book, a thing, as he says in the "Viaje," "to divert the melancholy moody heart at any time or season." No doubt he had an affection for his hero, and was very proud of Sancho Panza. It would have been strange indeed if he had not been proud of the most humorous creation in all fiction. He was proud, too, of the popularity and success of the book, and beyond measure delightful is the naïveté with which he shows his pride in a dozen passages in the Second Part. But it was not the success he coveted. In all probability he would have given all the success of "Don Quixote," nay, would have seen every copy of "Don Quixote" burned in the Plaza Mayor, for one such success as Lope de Vega was enjoying on an average once a week.
And so he went on, dawdling over "Don Quixote," adding a chapter now and again, and putting it aside to turn to "Persiles and Sigismunda"—which, as we know, was to be the most entertaining book in the language, and the rival of "Theagenes and Chariclea"—or finishing off one of his darling comedies; and if Robles asked when "Don Quixote" would be ready, the answer no doubt was "con brevedad"—shortly, there was time enough for that. At sixty-eight he was as full of life and hope and plans for the future as a boy of eighteen.
Nemesis was coming, however. He had got as far as chapter lix., which at his leisurely pace he could hardly have reached before October or November 1614, when there was put into his hand a small octavo lately printed at Tarragona, and calling itself "Second Volume of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha: by the Licentiate Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda of Tordesillas." The last half of chapter lix. and most of the following chapters of the Second Part give us some idea of the effect produced upon him, and his irritation was not likely to be lessened by the reflection that he had no one to blame but himself. Had Avellaneda, in fact, been content with merely bringing out a continuation to "Don Quixote," Cervantes would have had no reasonable grievance. His own intentions were expressed in the very vaguest language at the end of the book; nay, in his last words, "forse altri canterá con miglior plettro," he seems actually to invite some one else to continue the work, and he made ​no sign until eight years and a half had gone by; by which time Avellaneda's volume was no doubt written.
In fact Cervantes had no case, or a very bad one, as far as the mere continuation was concerned. But Avellaneda chose to write a preface to it, full of such coarse personal abuse as only an ill-conditioned man could pour out. He taunts Cervantes with being old, with having lost his hand, with having been in prison, with being poor, with being friendless, accuses him of envy of Lope's success, of petulance and querulousness, and so on; and it was in this that the sting lay. Avellaneda's reason for this personal attack is obvious enough. Whoever he may have been, it is clear that he was one of the dramatists of Lope's school, for he had the impudence to charge Cervantes with attacking him as well as Lope in his criticism on the drama. His identification has exercised the best critics and baffled all the ingenuity and research that has been brought to bear on it. Navarrete and Ticknor both incline to the belief that Cervantes knew who he was; but I must say I think the anger he shows suggests an invisible assailant; it is like the irritation of a man stung by a mosquito in the dark. Cervantes from certain solecisms of language pronounces him to be an Aragonese, and Pellicer, an Aragonese himself, supports this view and believes him, moreover, to have been an ecclesiastic, a Dominican probably. It has been suggested that he was Luis de Aliaga, the King's confessor; Andres Perez, the author of the "Picara Justina;" Bartolome de Argensola, the poet; Cervantes' old enemy, Blanco de Paz; Alarcon, the dramatist; even the great Lope himself; but the wildest surmise of all was that of the late Rawdon Brown, who put in a claim for the German scholar Gaspar Scöppe, or Scioppius, apparently because he was quarrelsome and happened to be in Spain about this time.
Neither the question nor the book would ever have been heard of outside the circle of bookworms had Cervantes only behaved as Aleman did when his continuation of "Guzman de Alfarache" was forestalled by Juan Marti. But the persistence and the vehemence of his invective sent readers to the book who would otherwise never have troubled themselves about it. In its own day it fell dead from the press, for the second edition in 1615 mentioned by Ebert is purely imaginary. But Blas de Nasarre, an early specimen of a type of littérateur now common, saw in Cervantes' vituperation a sufficient ​reason for taking the book up and proving it meritorious; and this he did in an edition in 1732, in which he showed that it was on the whole a superior work to the genuine "Don Quixote." The originality of this view—not that it was original, for Le Sage had said much the same—so charmed M. Germond de Lavigne that he produced in 1853 a French translation with a preface and notes, wherein he not only maintained that in humor, taste, invention, and truth to nature, Cervantes was surpassed by Avellaneda; but pointed out several passages to prove that he had borrowed ideas from a book that most likely did not exist at the time, and that most certainly he had not seen or heard of. All this of course is intelligible, but not so that a sound Spanish scholar and critic like the late Vicente Salva should have said, that if Cervantes' "Don Quixote" were not in existence Avellaneda's would be the best novel in the language; which (not to speak of the absurdity of putting it before "Lazarillo de Tormes," "Guzman de Alfarache," Quevedo's "Gran Tacaño," Isla's "Fray Gerundio de Campazas") is like saying that if there were no sun, the moon would be the brightest body in the heavens. Any merit Avellaneda has is reflected from Cervantes, and he is too dull to reflect much. "Dull and dirty" will always by, I imagine, the verdict of the vast majority of unprejudiced readers. He is, at best, a poor plagiarist; all he can do is to follow slavishly the lead given him by Cervantes; his only humor lies in making Don Quixote take inns for castles and fancy himself some legendary or historical personage, and Sancho mistake words, invert proverbs, and display his gluttony; all through he shows a proclivity to coarseness and dirt, and he has contrived to introduce two tales filthier than anything by the sixteenth century novellieri and without their sprightliness; tales that even Le Sage and M. de Lavigne did not dare to reproduce as they found them.
But whatever Avellaneda and his book may be, we much not forget the deby we owe them. But for them, there can be no doubt, "Don Quixote" would have come to us a mere torso instead of a complete work. Even if Cervantes had finished the volume he had in hand, most assuredly he would have left off with a promise of a Third Park, giving the further adventures of Don Quixote and humors of Sancho Panza as shepherds. It is plain that he had at one time an intention of dealing with the pastoral romances as he had dealt with the ​books of chivalry, and but for Avellaneda he would have tried to carry it out. But it is more likely that, with his plans, and projects, and hopefulness, the volume would have remained unfinished till his death, and that we should have never made the acquaintance of the Duke and Duchess, or gone with Sancho to Barataria.
From the moment the book came into his hands he seems to have been haunted by the fear that there might be more Avellanedas in the field, and putting everything else aside, he set himself to finish off his task and protect Don Quixote in the only way he could, by killing him. The conclusion is no doubt a hasty and in some places clumsy piece of work—the last chapter, indeed, is a curiosity of slovenly writing—and the frequent repetition of the scoldings administered to Avellaneda becomes in the end rather wearisome; but it is, at any rate, a conclusion, and for that we must thank Avellaneda.
The new volume was ready for the press in February, but was not printed till the very end of 1615, and during the interval Cervantes put together the comedies and interludes he had written within the last few years, and, as he adds plaintively, found no demand for among the managers, and published them with a preface, worth the book it introduces tenfold, in which he gives an account of the early Spanish stage, and of his own attempts as a dramatist. As for the interludes (eutremeses) they are mere farcical scenes without any pretence to a plot, but not without a certain amount of life and humor. With regard to the comedies, the unanimity of opinion is remarkable. Every one seems to approach them with the hope of finding them not altogether unworthy of Cervantes, not altogether the poor productions the critics have pronounced them, and every reader is compelled in the end reluctantly to give them up, and own, in the words of M. Emile Chasles, that "on se croirait à mille lieues du bon sens viril qui éclatera dans 'Don Quichotte.'" Nothing, perhaps, gives a better idea of their character and quality than that Bias de Nasarre, who published the second edition in 1749, should have, in perfect seriousness, advanced the theory that Cervantes wrote them with an object somewhat similar to that of "Don Quixote," in fact as burlesques upon the silly senseless plays of the day; and indeed had the "Rufian Dichoso" been written forty years later there would be nothing primâ facie absurd in supposing it a caricature of Calderon's mystic devotional dramas. It is needless to say ​they were put forward by Cervantes in all good faith and full confidence in their merits. The reader, however, was not to suppose they were his last word or final effort in the drama, for he had in hand a comedy called "Engaño á los ojos," about which, if he mistook not, there would be no question.
Of this dramatic masterpiece the world has had no opportunity of judging; his health had been failing for some time, and he died, apparently of dropsy, on the 23d of April, 1616, the day on which England lost Shakespeare, nominally at least, for the English calendar had not yet been reformed.
He died as he had lived, accepting his lot bravely and cheerfully. His dedication of the "Persiles and Sigismunda" to the Conde de Lemos is notable among recorded death-bed words for its simple unaffected serenity. He could wish, he says, that the opening line of the old ballad, "One foot in the stirrup already," did not serve so aptly to begin his letter with; they had given him the extreme unction the day before, his time was now short, his pains were growing greater, his hopes growing less; still he would gladly live a little longer to welcome his benefactor back to Spain; but if that might not be, Heaven's will be done. And then, the ruling passion asserting itself, he goes on to talk of his unfinished works, "The Weeks of the Garden," the famous "Bernardo," the conclusion of the "Galatea" that his Excellency liked so much; all which he would complete should Heaven prolong his life, which now could only be by a miracle.
Was it an unhappy life, that of Cervantes? His biographers all tell us that it was; but I must say I doubt it. It was a hard life, a life of poverty, of incessant struggle, of toil ill paid, of disappointment, but Cervantes carried within himself the antidote to all these evils. His was not one of those light natures that rise above adversity merely by virtue of their own buoyancy; it was in the fortitude of a high spirit that he was proof against it. It is impossible to conceive Cervantes giving way to despondency or prostrated by dejection. As for poverty, it was with him a thing to be laughed over, and the only sigh he ever allows to escape him is when he says, "Happy he to whom Heaven has given a piece of breap for which he is not bound to give thanks to any but Heaven itself." Add to all this his vital energy and mental activity, his restless invention and sanguine temperament, and there will be reason enough to doubt whether his could have been a ​very unhappy life. He who could take Cervantes' distresses together with his apparatus for enduring them would not make so bad a bargain, perhaps, as far as happiness in life is concerned.
It is pleasant, however, to think that the sunset was brighter than the day had been, and that at the close of his life he was not left dependent on his own high courage for comfort and support. He had failed in the object of his heart, but he had the consolation of knowing that if Spain had refused his dramas the world had welcomed his novel. He was still a poor man; "a soldier, a hidalgo, old and poor," was the description given to strangers asking who and what the author of "Don Quixote" was. But he was no longer friendless, and he no longer felt the pressure of poverty as he had felt it in the days of his obscurity. His good friends, the Conde de Lemos and the Archbishop of Toledo, as he himself tells us, had charged themselves with his welfare, and the booksellers did not look askance at his books now. If Juan de Villaroel paid him "reasonably," as he admits, for so unpromising a venture as the volume of comedies, we may presume that Robles gave him something substantial for the novels and for the Second Part of "Don Quixote." He was able to live, too, in what was then a fashionable quarter of Madrid, the maze of dull streets lying between the Carrera de San Geronimo and the Calle de Atocha. The house in which he died is in the Calle del Leon, but the doorway, marked by a medallion, is in the Calle de Francos, now the Calle de Cervantes, in which, a few doors farther down, the great Lope lived and died, while Quevedo lived a few paces off in the Calle del Niño.
Of his burial-place nothing is known except that he was buried, in accordance with his will, in the neighboring convent of Trinitarian nuns, of which it is supposed his daughter, Isabel de Saavedra, was an inmate, and that a few years afterwards the nuns removed to another convent, carrying their dead with them. But whether the remains of Cervantes were included in the removal or not no one knows, and the clew to their resting-place is now lost beyond all hope. This furnishes perhaps the least defensible of the items in the charge of neglect brought against his contemporaries. In some of the others there is a good deal of exaggeration. To listen to most of his biographers one would suppose that all Spain was in league not only against the man but against his memory, or at ​least that it was insensible to his merits, and left him to live in misery and die of want. To talk of his hard life and unworthy employments in Andalusia is absurd. What had he done to distinguish him from thousands of other struggling men earning a precarious livelihood? True, he was a gallant soldier, who had been wounded and had undergone captivity and suffering in his country's cause, but there were hundreds of others in the same case. He had written a mediocre specimen of an insipid class of romance, and some plays which manifestly did not comply with the primary condition of pleasing: were the playgoers to patronize plays that did not amuse them, because the author was to produce "Don Quixote" twenty years afterwards?
The scramble for copies which, as we have seen, followed immediately on the appearance of the book, does not look like general insensibility to its merits. No doubt it was received coldly by some, but if a man writes a book in ridicule of periwigs he must make his account with being coldly received by the periwig wearers and hated by the whole tribe of wig-makers. If Cervantes had the chivalry-romance readers, the sentimentalists, the dramatists, and the poets of the period all against him, it was because "Don Quixote" was what it was; and if the general public did not come forward to make him comfortable for the rest of his days, it is no more to be charged with neglect and ingratitude than the English-speaking public that did not pay off Scott's liabilities. It did the best it could; it read his book and liked it and bought it, and encouraged the bookseller to pay him well for others.
Another charge is that his fellow-countrymen have been so careless of his memory that they have allowed his portraits to be lost. It is always assumed that there was once a portrait of him painted by his friend Juan de Jauregui, but the words on which the assumption rests prove nothing of the kind. They imply nothing more than that Jauregui could or would paint a portrait of himself if asked to do so. There is even less ground for the supposition that Pacheco ever painted or drew his portrait, unless indeed we accept as satisfactory the arguments used by Don Jose-Maria Asensio y Toledo in support of that inserted by him in his "Nuevos Documentos," and reproduced in Sir W. Stirling Maxwell's "Don John of Austria" and Mr. Gibson's "Journey to Parnassus." But in truth they amount to nothing more than a chain of mere ​assumptions. It is an assumption that the manuscript on which the whole depends is a trustworthy document; an assumption that the picture Señor Asensio has fixed on is the one the manuscript means; and an assumption that the boatman he has fixed on in the picture is the portrait of Cervantes.
On the other hand, there is, among others, the improbability of Pacheco painting a portrait of Cervantes as a boatman, with the full use of both hands, and about five-and-twenty years of age, Cervantes being thirty-three at the time of his release at Algiers (which is supposed to be the occasion represented) and at least fifty-four at the time the picture was painted, if Pacheco was the painter. It will need a stronger case than this to establish a vera effigies of Cervantes. It is hardly necessary to remind the reader that the Spanish Academy picture from which the familiar engraved portrait is taken is now admitted on all hands to be a fabrication, based in all probability on the fancy portrait by Kent in Tonson's "Quixote" of 1738.
It has been also made a reproach to Spain that she has erected no monument to the man she is proudest of; no monument, that is to say, worthy of him; for the bronze statue in the little garden of the Plaza de las Cortes, a fair work of art no doubt, and unexceptionable had it been set up to the local poet in the market-place of some provincial town, is not worthy of Cervantes or of Madrid. But what need has Cervantes of "such weak witness of his name;" or what could a monument do in his case except to testify to the self-glorification of those who had put it up? Si monumentum quæris, circumspice. The nearest bookseller's shop will show what bathos there would be in a monument to the author of "Don Quixote."
* ↑ See next page for genealogical table.
* ↑ "Post tenchras spero lucem."V. fac-simile on titlepage.
* ↑ Señor Asensio's case may be said, indeed, to break down in his last assumption. Where Cervantes was from the end of 1598 to the beginning of 1603 we know not; but all his biographers are agreed that he did not remain in Seville. But the commission to paint the six pictures, of which Señor Asensio's is one, was only given to Vazquez and Pacheco in 1600, and no doubt they took some considerable time to paint. Cervantes, therefore, could not have sat for the head of the boatman. In the face of this difficulty, Señor Asensio assumes that Pacheco painted it from a portrait previously taken between 1590 and 1597. But, granted that Pacheco might have made Cervantes nearly thirty years younger in the picture, what motive could he have had for representing him as a young man of five or six and twenty in a sketch made, we are to suppose, as a memorial of his friend?