Chapter XI

CERVANTES NEGLECTED.--AT SEVILLE.--HIS FAILURE.--ASKS EMPLOYMENT IN AMERICA.--AT VALLADOLID.--HIS TROUBLES.--PUBLISHES THE FIRST PART OF DON QUIXOTE.--HE REMOVES TO MADRID.--HIS LIFE THERE.--HIS RELATIONS WITH LOPE DE VEGA.--HIS TALES AND THEIR CHARACTER.--HIS JOURNEY TO PARNASSUS, AND DEFENCE OF HIS DRAMAS.--PUBLISHES HIS PLAYS AND ENTREMESES.--THEIR CHARACTER.--SECOND PART OF DON QUIXOTE.--HIS DEATH.

The low condition of the theatre in his time was a serious misfortune to Cervantes. It prevented him from obtaining, as a dramatic author, a suitable remuneration for his efforts, even though they were, as he tells us, successful in winning public favor. If we add to this, that he was now married, that one of his sisters was dependent on him, and that he was maimed in his person and a neglected man, it will not seem remarkable, that, after struggling on for three years at Esquivias and Madrid, he found himself obliged to seek elsewhere the means of subsistence. In 1588, therefore, he went to Seville, then the great mart for the vast wealth coming in from America, and, as he afterwards called it, “a shelter for the poor and a refuge for the unfortunate.”[123] There he acted for some time as one of the agents of Antonio de Guevara, a royal commissary for the American fleets, and afterwards as a collector of moneys due to the government and to private individuals; an humble condition, certainly, and full of cares, but still one that gave him the bread he had vainly sought in other pursuits.

[123] “Volvíme á Sevilla,” says Berganza, in the “Coloquio de
los Perros,” “que es amparo de pobres y refugio de desdichados.”
Novelas, Madrid, 1783, 8vo, Tom. II. p. 362.

The chief advantage, perhaps, of these employments to a genius like that of Cervantes was, that they led him to travel much for ten years in different parts of Andalusia and Granada, and made him familiar with life and manners in these picturesque parts of his native country. During the latter portion of the time, indeed, partly owing to the failure of a person to whose care he had intrusted some of the moneys he had received, and partly, it is to be feared, owing to his own negligence, he became indebted to the government, and was imprisoned at Seville, as a defaulter, for a sum so small, that it seems to mark a more severe degree of poverty than he had yet suffered. After a strong application to the government, he was released from prison under an order of December 1, 1597, when he had been confined, apparently, about three months; but the claims of the public treasury on him were not adjusted in 1608, nor do we know what was the final result of his improvidence in relation to them, except that he does not seem to have been molested on the subject after that date.

During his residence at Seville, which, with some interruptions, extended from 1588 to 1598, or perhaps somewhat longer, Cervantes made an ineffectual application to the king for an appointment in America; setting forth by exact documents--which now constitute the most valuable materials for his biography--a general account of his adventures, services, and sufferings while a soldier in the Levant, and of the miseries of his life while he was a slave in Algiers.[124] This was in 1590. But no other than a formal answer seems ever to have been returned to the application; and the whole affair only leaves us to infer the severity of that distress which should induce him to seek relief in exile to a colony of which he has elsewhere spoken as the great resort of rogues.[125]

[124] This extraordinary mass of documents is preserved in the
Archivos de las Indias, which are admirably arranged in the
old and beautiful Exchange built by Herrera in Seville, when
Seville was the great _entrepôt_ between Spain and her colonies.
The papers referred to may be found in Estante II. Cajon 5,
Legajo 1, and were discovered by the venerable Cean Bermudez in
1808. The most important of them are published entire, and the
rest are well abridged, in the Life of Cervantes by Navarrete
(pp. 311-388). Cervantes petitioned in them for one of four
offices:--the Auditorship of New Granada; that of the galleys of
Carthagena; the Governorship of the Province of Soconusco; or the
place of Corregidor of the city of Paz.

[125] “Viéndose pues tan falto de dineros y aun no con muchos
amigos, se acogió al remedio á que otros muchos perdidos en
aquella ciudad [Sevilla] se acogen; que es, el pasarse á las
Indias, refugio y amparo de los desesperados de España, iglesia
de los alzados, salvo conducto de los homicidas, pala y cubierta
de los jugadores, añagaza general de mugeres libres, engaño comun
de muchos y remedio particular de pocos.” El Zeloso Estremeño,
Novelas, Tom. II. p. 1.

As an author, his residence at Seville has left few distinct traces of him. In 1595, he sent some trifling verses to Saragossa, which gained one of the prizes offered at the canonization of San Jacinto;[126] in 1596, he wrote a sonnet in ridicule of a great display of courage made in Andalusia after all danger was over and the English had evacuated Cadiz, which, under Essex, Elizabeth’s favorite, they had for a short time occupied;[127] and in 1598, he wrote another sonnet, in ridicule of an unseemly uproar that took place in the cathedral at Seville, from a pitiful jealousy between the municipality and the Inquisition, on occasion of the religious ceremonies observed there after the death of Philip the Second.[128] But except these trifles, we know of nothing that he wrote, during this active period of his life, unless we are to assign to it some of his tales, which, like the “Española Inglesa,” are connected with known contemporary events, or, like “Rinconete y Cortadillo,” savor so much of the manners of Seville, that it seems as if they could have been written nowhere else.

[126] These verses may be found in Navarrete, Vida, pp. 444, 445.

[127] Pellicer, Vida, ed. Don Quixote, (Madrid, 1797, 8vo, Tom. I.
p. lxxxv.), gives the sonnet.

[128] Sedano, Parnaso Español, Tom. IX. p. 193. In the “Viage al
Parnaso,” c. 4, he calls it “Honra principal de mis escritos.”
But he was mistaken, or he jested,--I rather think the last.
For an account of the indecent uproar Cervantes ridiculed, and
needful to explain this sonnet, see Semanario Pintoresco, Madrid,
1842, p. 177.

Of the next period of his life,--and it is the important one immediately preceding the publication of the First Part of Don Quixote,--we know even less than of the last. A uniform tradition, however, declares that he was employed by the Grand Prior of the Order of Saint John in La Mancha to collect rents due to his monastery in the village of Argamasilla; that he went there on this humble agency and made the attempt, but that the debtors refused payment, and, after persecuting him in different ways, ended by throwing him into prison, where, in a spirit of indignation, he began to write the Don Quixote, making his hero a native of the village that treated him so ill, and laying the scene of most of the knight’s earlier adventures in La Mancha. But though this is possible, and even probable, we have no direct proof of it. Cervantes says, indeed, in his Preface to the First Part, that his Don Quixote was begun in a prison;[129] but this may refer to his earlier imprisonment at Seville, or his subsequent one at Valladolid. All that is certain, therefore, is, that he had friends and relations in La Mancha; that, at some period of his life, he must have enjoyed an opportunity of acquiring the intimate knowledge of its people, antiquities, and topography, which the Don Quixote shows; and that this could hardly have happened except between the end of 1598, when we lose all trace of him at Seville, and the beginning of 1603, when we find him established at Valladolid.

[129] “Se engendró en una cárcel.” Avellaneda says the same thing
in his Preface, but says it contemptuously: “Pero disculpan los
yerros de su Primera Parte en esta materia, el haberse escrito
entre _los_ de una cárcel,” etc. A base insinuation seems implied
in the use of the relative article _los_.

To Valladolid he went, apparently because the court had been removed thither by the caprice of Philip the Third and the interests of his favorite, the Duke of Lerma; but, as everywhere else, there too, he was overlooked and left in poverty. Indeed, we should hardly know he was in Valladolid at all before the publication of the First Part of his Don Quixote, but for two painful circumstances. The first is an account, in his own handwriting, for sewing done by his sister, who, having sacrificed every thing for his redemption from captivity, became dependent on him during her widowhood and died in his family. The other is, that, in one of those night-brawls common among the gallants of the Spanish court, a stranger was killed near the house where Cervantes lived; in consequence of which, and of some suspicions that fell on the family, he was, according to the hard provisions of the Spanish law, confined with the other principal witnesses until an investigation could take place.[130]

[130] Pellicer’s Life, pp. cxvi.-cxxxi.

But in the midst of poverty and embarrassments, and while acting in the humble capacity of general agent and amanuensis for those who needed his services,[131] Cervantes had prepared for the press the First Part of his Don Quixote, which was licensed in 1604, at Valladolid, and printed in 1605, at Madrid. It was received with such decided favor, that, before the year was out, another edition was called for at Madrid, and two more elsewhere; circumstances which, after so many discouragements in other attempts to procure a subsistence, naturally turned his thoughts more towards letters than they had been at any previous period of his life.

[131] One of the witnesses in the preceding criminal inquiry says
that Cervantes was visited by different persons, “por ser hombre
que escribe y trata negocios.”

In 1606, the court having gone back to Madrid, Cervantes followed it, and there passed the remainder of his life; changing his residence to different parts of the city at least seven times in the course of ten years, apparently as he was driven hither and thither by his necessities. In 1609, he joined the Brotherhood of the Holy Sacrament,--one of those religious associations which were then fashionable, and the same of which Quevedo, Lope de Vega, and other distinguished men of letters of the time, were members. About the same period, too, he seems to have become known to most of these persons, as well as to others of the favored poets round the court, among whom were Espinel and the two Argensolas; though what were his relations with them, beyond those implied in the commendatory verses they prefixed to each other’s works, we do not know.

Concerning his relations with Lope de Vega there has been much discussion to little purpose. Certain it is, that Cervantes often praises this great literary idol of his age, and that four or five times Lope stoops from his pride of place and compliments Cervantes, though never beyond the measure of praise he bestows on many whose claims were greatly inferior. But in his stately flight, it is plain that he soared much above the author of Don Quixote, to whose highest merits he seemed carefully to avoid all homage;[132] and though I find no sufficient reason to suppose their relation to each other was marked by any personal jealousy or ill-will, as has been sometimes supposed, yet I can find no proof that it was either intimate or kindly. On the contrary, when we consider the good-nature of Cervantes, which made him praise to excess nearly all his other literary contemporaries, as well as the greatest of them all, and when we allow for the frequency of hyperbole in such praises at that time, which prevented them from being what they would now be, we may perceive an occasional coolness in his manner, when he speaks of Lope, which shows, that, without overrating his own merits and claims, he was not insensible to the difference in their respective positions, or to the injustice towards himself implied by it. Indeed, his whole tone, whenever he notices Lope, seems to be marked with much personal dignity, and to be singularly honorable to him.[133]

[132] Laurel de Apolo, Silva 8, where he is praised _only_ as a
poet.

[133] Most of the materials for forming a judgment on this point
in Cervantes’s character are to be found in Navarrete, (Vida,
pp. 457-475), who maintains that Cervantes and Lope were sincere
friends, and in Huerta, (Leccion Crítica, Madrid, 1786, 12mo,
pp. 33-47), who maintains that Cervantes was an envious rival
of Lope. As I cannot adopt either of these results, and think
the last particularly unjust, I will venture to add one or two
considerations.

Lope was fifteen years younger than Cervantes, and was
forty-three years old when the First Part of the Don Quixote was
published; but from that time till the death of Cervantes, a
period of eleven years, he does not, that I am aware, once allude
to him. The five passages in the immense mass of Lope’s works, in
which alone, so far as I know, he speaks of Cervantes are,--1.
In the “Dorothea,” 1598, twice slightly and without praise. 2.
In the Preface to his own Tales, 1621, still more slightly, and
even, I think, coldly. 3. In the “Laurel de Apolo,” 1630, where
there is a somewhat stiff eulogy of him, fourteen years after his
death. 4. In his play, “El Premio del Bien Hablar,” printed in
Madrid, 1635, where Cervantes is barely mentioned (Comedias, 4to,
Tom. XXI. f. 162). And 5. In “Amar sin Saber á Quien,” (Comedias,
Madrid, Tom. XXII., 1635), where (Jornada primera) Leonarda, one
of the principal ladies, says to her maid, who had just cited a
ballad of Audalla and Xarifa to her,--

Inez, take care; your common reading is,
I know, the Ballad-book; and, after all,
Your case may prove like that of the poor knight----

to which Inez replies, interrupting her mistress,--

Don Quixote of la Mancha, if you please,--
May God Cervantes pardon!--was a knight
Of that wild, erring sort the Chronicle
So magnifies. For me, I only read
The Ballad-book, and find myself from day
To day the better for it.

All this looks very reserved; but when we add to it, that
there were numberless occasions on which Lope could have
gracefully noticed the merit to which he could never have
been insensible,--especially when he makes so free a use of
Cervantes’s “Trato de Argel” in his own “Esclavos de Argel,”
absolutely introducing him by name on the stage, and giving him
a prominent part in the action, (Comedias, Çaragoça, 1647, 4to,
Tom. XXV. pp. 245, 251, 257, 262, 277), without showing any of
those kindly or respectful feelings which it was easy and common
to show to friends on the Spanish stage, and which Calderon,
for instance, so frequently shows to Cervantes, (e. g. Casa con
Dos Puertas, Jorn. I., etc.),--we can hardly doubt that Lope
willingly overlooked and neglected Cervantes, at least from the
time of the appearance of the First Part of Don Quixote, in 1605,
till after its author’s death, in 1616.

On the other hand, Cervantes, from the date of the “Canto de
Calíope” in the “Galatea,” 1584, when Lope was only twenty-two
years old, to the date of the Preface to the Second Part of Don
Quixote, 1615, only a year before his own death, was constantly
giving Lope the praises due to one who, beyond all _contemporary_
doubt or rivalship, was at the head of Spanish literature; and,
among other proofs of such elevated and generous feelings,
prefixed, in 1598, a laudatory sonnet to Lope’s “Dragontea.” But
at the same time that he did this, and did it freely and fully,
there is a dignified reserve and caution in some parts of his
remarks about Lope that show he was not impelled by any warm,
personal regard; a caution which is so obvious, that Avellaneda,
in the Preface to his Don Quixote, maliciously interpreted it
into envy.

It therefore seems to me difficult to avoid the conclusion,
that the relations between the two great Spanish authors of
this period were such as might be expected, where one was, to
an extraordinary degree, the idol of his time, and the other a
suffering and neglected man. What is most agreeable about the
whole matter is the generous justice Cervantes never fails to
render to Lope’s merits.

In 1613, he published his “Novelas Exemplares,” Instructive or Moral Tales,[134] twelve in number, and making one volume. Some of them were written several years before, as was “The Impertinent Curiosity,” inserted in the First Part of Don Quixote,[135] and “Rinconete y Cortadillo,” which is mentioned there, so that both must be dated as early as 1604; while others contain internal evidence of the time of their composition, as the “Española Inglesa” does, which seems to have been written in 1611. All of these stories are, as he intimates in their Preface, original, and most of them have the air of being drawn from his personal experience and observation.

[134] He explains in his Preface the meaning he wishes to
give the word _exemplares_, saying, “Heles dado nombre de
_exemplares_, y si bien lo miras, no hay ninguna de quien no se
puede sacar algun exemplo provechoso.” The word _exemplo_, from
the time of the Archpriest of Hita and Don Juan Manuel, has had
the meaning of _instruction_ or _instructive story_.

[135] The “Curioso Impertinente,” first printed in 1605, in
the First Part of Don Quixote, was separately printed in Paris
in 1608,--five years before the collected Novelas appeared in
Madrid,--by Cæsar Oudin, a teacher of Spanish at the French
court, who caused several other Spanish books to be printed
in Paris, where the Castilian was in much favor from the
intermarriages between the crowns of France and Spain.

Their value is different, for they are written with different views, and in a variety of style and manner greater than he has elsewhere shown; but most of them contain touches of what is peculiar in his talent, and are full of that rich eloquence and of those pleasing descriptions of natural scenery which always flow so easily from his pen. They have little in common with the graceful story-telling spirit of Boccaccio and his followers, and still less with the strictly practical tone of Don Juan Manuel’s tales; nor, on the other hand, do they approach, except in the case of the Impertinent Curiosity, the class of short novels which have been frequent in other countries within the last century. The more, therefore, we examine them, the more we shall find that they are original in their composition and general tone, and that they are strongly marked with the individual genius of their author, as well as with the more peculiar traits of the national character,--the ground, no doubt, on which they have always been favorites at home, and less valued than they deserve to be abroad. As works of invention, they rank, among their author’s productions, next after Don Quixote; in correctness and grace of style they stand before it.

The first in the series, “The Little Gypsy Girl,” is the story of a beautiful creature, Preciosa, who had been stolen, when an infant, from a noble family, and educated in the wild community of the Gypsies,--that mysterious and degraded race which, until within the last fifty years, has always thriven in Spain since it first appeared there in the fifteenth century. There is a truth, as well as a spirit, in parts of this little story, that cannot be overlooked. The description of Preciosa’s first appearance in Madrid during a great religious festival; the effect produced by her dancing and singing in the streets; her visits to the houses to which she was called for the amusement of the rich; and the conversations, compliments, and style of entertainment, are all admirable, and leave no doubt of their truth and reality. But there are other passages which, mistaking in some respects the true Gypsy character, seem as if they were rather drawn from some such imitations of it as the “Life of Bampfylde Moore Carew” than from a familiarity with Gypsy life as it then existed in Spain.[136]

[136] This story has been dramatized more than once in Spain,
and freely used elsewhere. See note on the “Gitanilla” of Solís,
_post_, Chap. 25.

The next of the tales is very different, and yet no less within the personal experience of Cervantes himself. It is called “The Generous Lover,” and is nearly the same in its incidents with an episode found in his own “Trato de Argel.” The scene is laid in Cyprus, two years after the capture of that island by the Turks in 1570; but here it is his own adventures in Algiers upon which he draws for the materials and coloring of what is Turkish in his story, and the vivacity of his descriptions shows how much of reality there is in both.

The third story, “Rinconete y Cortadillo,” is again quite unlike any of the others. It is an account of two young vagabonds, not without ingenuity and spirit, who join at Seville, in 1569, one of those organized communities of robbers and beggars which often recur in the history of Spanish society and manners during the last three centuries. The realm of Monipodio, their chief, reminds us at once of Alsatia in Sir Walter Scott’s “Nigel,” and the resemblance is made still more obvious afterwards, when, in “The Colloquy of the Dogs,” we find the same Monipodio in secret league with the officers of justice. A single trait, however, will show with what fidelity Cervantes has copied from nature. The members of this confederacy, who lead the most dissolute and lawless lives, are yet represented as superstitious, and as having their images, their masses, and their contributions for pious charities, as if robbery were a settled and respectable vocation, a part of whose income was to be devoted to religious purposes in order to consecrate the remainder; a delusion which, in forms alternately ridiculous and revolting, has subsisted in Spain from very early times down to the present day.[137]

[137] It is an admirable hit, when Rinconete, first becoming
acquainted with one of the rogues, asks him, “Es vuesa merced
por ventura ladron?” and the rogue replies, “_Sí, para servir
á Dios y á la buena gente._” (Novelas, Tom. I. p. 235.) And,
again, the scene (pp. 242-247) where Rinconete and Cortadillo are
received among the robbers, and that (pp. 254, 255) where two
of the shameless women of the gang are very anxious to provide
candles to set up as devout offerings before their patron saints,
are hardly less happy, and are perfectly true to the characters
represented. Indeed, it is plain from this tale, and from several
of the Entremeses of Cervantes, that he was familiar with the
life of the rogues of his time. Fermin Caballero, in a pleasant
tract on the Geographical Knowledge of Cervantes, (Pericia
Geográfica de Cervantes, Madrid, 1840, 12mo), notes the aptness
with which Cervantes alludes to the different localities in the
great cities of Spain, which constituted the rendezvous and
lurking-places of its vagabond population. (p. 75.) Among these
Seville was preëminent. Guevara, when he describes a community
like that of Monipodio, places it, as Cervantes does, in Seville.
Diablo Cojuelo, Tranco IX.

It would be easy to go on and show how the rest of the tales are marked with similar traits of truth and nature: for example, the story founded on the adventures of a Spanish girl carried to England when Cadiz was sacked in 1596; “The Jealous Estremadurian,” and “The Fraudulent Marriage,” the last two of which bear internal evidence of being founded on fact; and even “The Pretended Aunt,” which, as he did not print it himself,--apparently in consequence of its coarseness,--ought not now to be placed among his works, is after all the story of an adventure that really occurred at Salamanca in 1575.[138] Indeed, they are all fresh from the racy soil of the national character, as that character is found in Andalusia; and are written with an idiomatic richness, a spirit, and a grace, which, though they are the oldest tales of their class in Spain, have left them ever since without successful rivals.

[138] Coarse as it is, however, the “Tia Fingida” was found,
with “Rinconete y Cortadillo,” and several other tales and
miscellanies, in a manuscript collection of stories and trifles
made 1606-10, for the amusement of the Archbishop of Seville,
D. Fernando Niño de Guevara; and long afterwards carefully
preserved by the Jesuits of St. Hermenegild. A castigated copy
of it was printed by Arrieta in his “Espíritu de Miguel de
Cervantes” (Madrid, 1814, 12mo); but the Prussian ambassador in
Spain, if I mistake not, soon afterwards obtained possession of
an unaltered copy and sent it to Berlin, where it was published
by the famous Greek scholar, F. A. Wolf, first in one of the
periodicals of Berlin, and afterwards in a separate pamphlet.
(See his Vorbericht to the “Tia Fingida, Novela inédita de Miguel
de Cervantes Saavedra,” Berlin, 1818, 8vo.) It has since been
printed in Spain with the other tales of Cervantes.

Some of the tales of Cervantes were translated into English as
early as 1640; but not into French, I think, till 1768, and not
well into that language till Viardot published his translation
(Paris, 1838, 2 tom., 8vo). Even he, however, did not venture
on the obscure puns and jests of the “Licenciado Vidriera,” a
fiction of which Moreto made some use in his play of the same
name, representing the Licentiate, however, as a feigned madman
and not as a real one, and showing little of the humor of the
original conception. (Comedias Escogidas, Madrid, 4to, Tom. V.
1653.) Under the name of “Léocadie,” there is a poor abridgment
of the “Fuerza de la Sangre,” by Florian. The old English
translation by Mabbe (London, 1640, folio) is said by Godwin to
be “perhaps the most perfect specimen of prose translation in the
English language.” (Lives of E. and J. Phillips, London, 1815,
4to, p. 246.) The praise is excessive, but the translation is
certainly very well done. It, however, extends only to six of the
tales.

In 1614, the year after they appeared, Cervantes printed his “Journey to Parnassus”; a satire in _terza rima_, divided into eight short chapters, and written in professed imitation of an Italian satire, by Cesare Caporali, on the same subject and in the same measure.[139] The poem of Cervantes has little merit. It is an account of a summons by Apollo, requiring all good poets to come to his assistance for the purpose of driving all the bad poets from Parnassus, in the course of which Mercury is sent in a royal galley, allegorically built and rigged with different kinds of verses, to Cervantes, who, being confidentially consulted about the Spanish poets that can be trusted as allies in the war against bad taste, has an opportunity of speaking his opinion on whatever relates to the poetry of his time.

[139] The first edition is in small duodecimo, (Madrid, 1614),
80 leaves; better printed, I think, than any other of his works
that were published under his own care. Little but the opening is
imitated from Cesare Caporali’s “Viaggio in Parnaso,” which is
only about one fifth as long as the poem of Cervantes.

The most interesting part is the fourth chapter, in which he slightly notices the works he has himself written,[140] and complains, with a gayety that at least proves his good-humor, of the poverty and neglect with which they have been rewarded.[141] It may be difficult, perhaps, to draw a line between such feelings as Cervantes here very strongly expresses, and the kindred ones of vanity and presumption; but yet, when his genius, his wants, and his manly struggles against the gravest evils of life are considered, and when to this are added the light-heartedness and simplicity with which he always speaks of himself, and the indulgence he always shows to others, few will complain of him for claiming with some boldness honors that had been coldly withheld, and to which he felt that he was entitled.

[140] Among them he speaks of many ballads that he had written:--

Yo he compuesto Romances infinitos,
Y el de los Zelos es aquel que estimo
Entre otros, que los tengo por malditos.

c. 4.

All these are lost, except such as may be found scattered through
his longer works, and some which have been suspected to be his
in the Romancero General. Clemencin, notes to his ed. of Don
Quixote, Tom. III. pp. 156, 214. Coleccion de Poesías de Don
Ramon Fernandez, Madrid, 1796, 8vo, Tom. XVI. p. 175. Mayans,
Vida de Cervantes, No. 164.

[141] Apollo tells him, (Viage, ed. 1784, p. 55),--

“Mas si quieres salir de tu querella,
Alegre y no confuso y consolado,
Dobla tu capa y siéntate sobre ella.
Que tal vez suele un venturoso estado,
Quando le niega sin razon la suerte,
Honrar mas merecido que alcanzado.”
“Bien parece, Señor, que no se advierte,”
Le respondí, “que yo no tengo capa.”
El dixo: “Aunque sea así, gusto de verte.”

At the end he has added a humorous prose dialogue, called the “Adjunta,” defending his dramas, and attacking the actors who refused to represent them. He says that he had prepared six full-length plays, and six Entremeses or farces; but that the theatre had its pensioned poets, and so took no note of him. The next year, however, when their number had become eight plays and eight Entremeses, he found a publisher, though not without difficulty; for the bookseller, as he says in the Preface, had been warned by a noble author, that from his prose much might be hoped, but from his poetry nothing. And truly his position in relation to the theatre was not one to be desired. Thirty years had passed since he had himself been a successful writer for it; and the twenty or more pieces he had then produced, some of which he mentions anew with great complacency,[142] were, no doubt, long since forgotten. In the interval, as he tells us, “that great prodigy of nature, Lope de Vega, has raised himself to the monarchy of the theatre, subjected it to his control, and placed all its actors under his jurisdiction; filled the world with becoming plays, happily and well written; ... and if any persons (and in truth there are not a few such) have desired to enter into competition with him and share the glory of his labors, all they have done, when put together, would not equal the half of what has been done by him alone.”[143]

[142] The “Confusa” was evidently his favorite among these
earlier pieces. In the Viage he says of it,--

Soy por quien La Confusa nada fea
Pareció en los teatros admirable;

and in the “Adjunta” he says, “De la que mas me precio fué _y
es_, de una llamada La Confusa, la qual, con paz sea dicho, de
quantas comedias de capa y espada hasta hoy se han representado,
bien puede tener lugar señalado por buena entre las mejores.”
This boast, it should be remembered, was made in 1614, when
Cervantes had printed the First Part of the Don Quixote, and
when Lope and his school were at the height of their glory. It
is probable, however, that we, at the present day should be
more curious to see the “Batalla Naval,” which, from its name,
contained, I think, his personal experiences at the fight of
Lepanto, as the “Trato de Argel” contained those at Algiers.

[143] After alluding to his earlier efforts on the stage,
Cervantes goes on in the Prólogo to his new plays: “Tuve otras
cosas en que ocuparme; dexé la pluma y las comedias, y entró
luego el monstruo de naturaleza, el gran Lope de Vega, y
alzóse con la monarquía cómica; avasalló y puso debaxo de su
jurisdiccion á todos los Farsantes, llenó el mundo de Comedias
propias, felices y bien razonadas; y tantas que passan de diez
mil pliegos los que tiene escritos, y todas (que es una de las
mayores cosas que puede decirse) las ha visto representar, ú
oido decir (por lo menos) que se han representado; y si algunos,
(que hay muchos) han querido entrar á la parte y gloria de sus
trabajos, todos juntos no llegan en lo que han escrito á la mitad
de lo que él solo,” etc.

The number of these writers for the stage in 1615 was, as Cervantes intimates, very considerable; and when he goes on to enumerate, among the more successful, Mira de Mescua, Guillen de Castro, Aguilar, Luis Vélez de Guevara, Gaspar de Avila, and several others, we perceive, at once, that the essential direction and character of the Spanish drama were at last determined. Of course, the free field open to him when he composed the plays of his youth was now closed; and as he wrote from the pressure of want, he could venture to write only according to the models triumphantly established by Lope de Vega and his imitators.

The eight plays or Comedias he now produced were, therefore, all composed in the style and in the forms of verse already fashionable and settled. Their subjects are as various as the subjects of his tales. One of them is a _rifacimento_ of his “Trato de Argel,” and is curious, because it contains some of the materials, and even occasionally the very phraseology, of the story of the Captive in Don Quixote, and because Lope de Vega thought fit afterwards to use it somewhat too freely in the composition of his own “Esclavos en Argel.”[144] Much of it seems to be founded in fact; among the rest, the deplorable martyrdom of a child in the third act, and the representation of one of the _Coloquios_ or farces of Lope de Rueda by the slaves in their prison-yard.

[144] This play, which Cervantes calls “Los Baños de Argel,”
(Comedias, 1749, Tom. I. p. 125), opens with the landing of a
Moorish corsair on the coast of Valencia; gives an account of the
sufferings of the captives taken in this descent, as well as the
sufferings of others afterward; and ends with a Moorish wedding
and a Christian martyrdom. He says of it himself,--

No de la imaginacion
Este trato se sacó,
Que la verdad lo fraguó
Bien lejos de la ficcion.

p. 186.

The verbal resemblances between the play and the story of the
Captive are chiefly in the first _jornada_ of the play, as
compared with Don Quixote, Parte I. c. 40.

Another of the plays, the story of which is also said to be true, is “El Gallardo Español,” or The Bold Spaniard.[145] Its hero, named Saavedra, and therefore, perhaps, of the old family into which that of Cervantes had long before intermarried, goes over to the Moors for a time, from a point of honor about a lady, but turns out at last a true Spaniard in every thing else, as well as in the exaggeration of his gallantry. “The Sultana” is founded on the history of a Spanish captive, who rose so high in the favor of the Grand Turk, that she is represented in the play as having become, not merely a favorite, but absolutely the Sultana, and yet as continuing to be a Christian,--a story which was readily believed in Spain, though only the first part of it is true, as Cervantes must have known, since Catharine of Oviedo, who is the heroine, was his contemporary.[146] The “Rufian Dichoso” is a Don Juan in licentiousness and crime, who is converted and becomes so extraordinary a saint, that, to redeem the soul of a dying sinner, Doña Ana de Treviño, he formally surrenders to her his own virtues and good works, and assumes her sins, beginning anew, through incredible sufferings, the career of penitence and reformation; all of which, or at least what is the most gross and revolting in it, is declared by Cervantes, as an eye-witness, to be true.[147]

[145] The part we should least willingly suppose to be true--that
of a droll, roistering soldier, who gets a shameful subsistence
by begging for souls in Purgatory, and spending on his own
gluttony the alms he receives--is particularly vouched for by
Cervantes. “Esto de pedir para las ánimas es cuento verdadero,
que _yo lo ví_.” How so indecent an exhibition on the stage could
be permitted is the wonder. Once, for instance, when in great
personal danger, he prays thus, as if he had read the “Clouds” of
Aristophanes:--

Animas de Purgatorio!
Favoreced me, Señoras!
Que mi peligro es notorio,
Si ya no estais en estas horas
Durmiendo en el dormitorio.

Tom. I. p. 34.

At the end he says his principal intent has been--

Mezclar verdades
Con fabulosos intentos.

The Spanish doctrine of the play--all for love and glory--is well
expressed in the two following lines from the second _jornada_:--

Que por reynar y por amor no hay culpa,
Que no tenga perdon, y halle disculpa.

[146]
Se vino á Constantinopla,
Creo el ano de seiscientos.

Jor. III.

[147] The Church prayers on the stage, in this play and
especially in Jornada II., and the sort of legal contract used
to transfer the merits of the healthy saint to the dying sinner,
are among the revolting exhibitions of the Spanish drama which
at first seem inexplicable, but which anyone who reads far in
it easily understands. Cervantes, in many parts of this strange
play, avers the truth of what he thus represents, saying, “Todo
esto fué verdad”; “Todo esto fué así”; “Así se cuenta en su
historia,” etc.

The remaining four plays are no less various in their subjects and no less lawless in the modes of treating them; and all the eight are divided into three _jornadas_, which Cervantes uses as strictly synonymous with acts.[148] All preserve the character of the Fool, who in one instance is an ecclesiastic,[149] and all extend over any amount of time and space that is found convenient to the action; the “Rufian Dichoso,” for instance, beginning in Seville and Toledo, during the youth of the hero, and ending in Mexico in his old age. The personages represented are extravagant in their number,--once amounting to above thirty,--and among them, besides every variety of human existences, are Demons, Souls in Purgatory, Lucifer, Fear, Despair, Jealousy, and other similar phantasms. The truth is, Cervantes had renounced all the principles of the drama which his discreet canon had so gravely set forth ten years earlier in the First Part of Don Quixote; and now, whether with the consent of his will, or only with that of his poverty, we cannot tell, but, as may be seen, not merely in the plays themselves, but in a sort of induction to the second act of the Rufian Dichoso, he had fully and knowingly adopted the dramatic theories of Lope’s school.

[148] He uses the words as convertible. Tom. I. pp. 21, 22; Tom.
II. p. 25, etc.

[149] In the “Baños de Argel,” where he is sometimes indecorous
enough, as when, (Tom. I. p. 151), giving the Moors the reason
why his old general, Don John of Austria, does not come to subdue
Algiers, he says:--

Sin duda, que, en el cielo,
Debia de haber gran guerra,
Do el General faltaba,
Y á Don Juan se llevaron para serlo.

The eight Entremeses are better than the eight full-length plays. They are short farces, generally in prose, with a slight plot, and sometimes with none, and were intended merely to amuse an audience in the intervals between the acts of the longer pieces. “The Spectacle of Wonders,” for instance, is only a series of practical tricks to frighten the persons attending a puppet-show, so as to persuade them that they see what is really not on the stage. “The Watchful Guard” interests us, because he seems to have drawn the character of the soldier from his own; and the date of 1611, which is contained in it, may indicate the time when it was written. “The Jealous Old Man” is a reproduction of the tale of “The Jealous Estremadurian,” with a different and more spirited conclusion. And the “Cueva de Salamanca” is one of those jests at the expense of husbands which are common enough on the Spanish stage, and were, no doubt, equally common in Spanish life and manners. All, indeed, have an air of truth and reality, which, whether they were founded in fact or not, it was evidently the author’s purpose to give them.

But there was an insuperable difficulty in the way of all his efforts on the stage. Cervantes had not dramatic talent, nor a clear perception how dramatic effects were to be produced. From the time when he wrote the “Trato de Argel,” which was an exhibition of the sufferings he had himself witnessed and shared in Algiers, he seemed to suppose that whatever was both absolutely true and absolutely striking could be produced with effect on the theatre; thus confounding the province of romantic fiction and story-telling with that of theatrical representation, and often relying on trivial incidents and an humble style for effects which could be produced only by ideal elevation and incidents so combined by a dramatic instinct as to produce a dramatic interest.

This was, probably, owing in part to the different direction of his original genius, and in part to the condition of the theatre, which in his youth he had found open to every kind of experiment and really settled in nothing. But whatever may have been the cause of his failure, the failure itself has been a great stumbling-block in the way of Spanish critics, who have resorted to somewhat violent means in order to prevent the reputation of Cervantes from being burdened with it. Thus, Blas de Nasarre, the king’s librarian,--who, in 1749, published the first edition of these unsuccessful dramas that had appeared since they were printed above a century earlier,--would persuade us, in his Preface, that they were written by Cervantes to parody and caricature the theatre of Lope de Vega;[150] though, setting aside all that at once presents itself from the personal relations of the parties, nothing can be more serious than the interest Cervantes took in the fate of his plays, and the confidence he expressed in their dramatic merit; while, at the same time, not a line has ever been pointed out as a parody in any one of them.[151]

[150] See the early part of the “Prólogo del que hace imprimir.”
I am not certain that Blas de Nasarre was perfectly fair in
all this; for he printed, in 1732, an edition of Avellaneda’s
continuation of Don Quixote, in the Preface to which he says
that he thinks the character of Avellaneda’s Sancho is more
natural than that of Cervantes’s Sancho; that the Second Part of
Cervantes’s Don Quixote is taken from Avellaneda’s; and that,
in its essential merits, the work of Avellaneda is equal to
that of Cervantes. “No se puede disputar,” he says, “la gloria
de la invencion de Cervantes, aunque no es inferior la de la
imitacion de Avellaneda”; to which he adds afterwards, “Es cierto
que es necesario mayor esfuerzo de ingenio para añadir á las
primeras invenciones, que para hacerlas.” (See Avellaneda, Don
Quixote, Madrid, 1805, 12mo, Tom. I. p. 34.) Now, the _Juicio_,
or Preface, from which these opinions are taken, and which is
really the work of Nasarre, is announced by him, not as his own,
but as the work of an anonymous friend, precisely as if he were
not willing to avow such opinions under his own name. (Pellicer’s
Vida de Cervantes, ed. Don Quixote, I. p. clxvi.) In this way a
disingenuous look is given to what would otherwise have been only
an absurdity; and what, taken in connection with this reprint of
Cervantes’s poor dramas and the Preface to them, seems like a
willingness to let down the reputation of a genius that Nasarre
could not comprehend.

It is intimated, in an anonymous pamphlet, called “Exámen Crítico
del Tomo Primero del Antiquixote,” (Madrid, 1806, 12mo), that
Nasarre had sympathies with Avellaneda as an Aragonese; and the
pamphlet in question being understood to be the work of J. A.
Pellicer, the editor of Don Quixote, this intimation deserves
notice. It may be added, that Nasarre belonged to the French
school of the eighteenth century in Spain;--a school that saw
little merit in the older Spanish drama.

[151] The extravagant opinion, that these plays of Cervantes were
written to discredit the plays then in fashion on the stage,
just as the Don Quixote was written to discredit the fashionable
books of chivalry, did not pass uncontradicted at the time. The
year after it was published, a pamphlet appeared, entitled “La
Sinrazon impugnada y Beata de Lavapies, Coloquio Crítico apuntado
al disparatado Prólogo que sirve de delantal (segun nos dice su
Autor) á las Comedias de Miguel de Cervantes, compuesto por Don
Joseph Carillo” (Madrid, 1750, 4to, pp. 25). It is a spirited
little tract, chiefly devoted to a defence of Lope and of
Calderon, though the point about Cervantes is not forgotten (pp.
13-15.) But in the same year a more formidable work appeared on
the same side, called “Discurso Crítico sobre el Orígen, Calidad,
y Estado presente de las Comedias de España, contra el Dictámen
que las supone corrompidas, etc., por un Ingenio de esta Corte”
(Madrid, 1750, 4to, pp. 285). The author was a lawyer in Madrid,
D. Thomas Zavaleta, and he writes with as little philosophy and
judgment as the other Spanish critics of his time; but he treats
Blas de Nasarre with small ceremony.

This position being untenable, Lampillas, who, in the latter part of the last century, wrote a long defence of Spanish literature against the suggestions of Tiraboschi and Bettinelli in Italy, gravely maintains that Cervantes sent, indeed, eight plays and eight Entremeses to the booksellers, but that the booksellers took the liberty to change them, and printed eight others with his name and Preface. It should not, however, be forgotten that Cervantes lived to prepare two works after this, and if such an insult had been offered him, the country, judging from the way in which he treated the less gross offence of Avellaneda, would have been filled with his reproaches and remonstrances.[152]

[152] “Ensayo Histórico-apologético de la Literatura Española,”
Madrid, 1789, 8vo, Tom. VI. pp. 170, etc. “Suprimiendo las que
verdaderamente eran de él,” are the bold words of the critic.

Nothing remains, therefore, but to confess--what seems, indeed, to be quite incontestable--that Cervantes wrote several plays which fell seriously below what might have been hoped from him. Passages, indeed, may be found in them where his genius asserts itself. “The Labyrinth of Love,” for instance, has a chivalrous air and plot that make it interesting; and the Entremes of “The Pretended Biscayan,” contains specimens of the peculiar humor with which we always associate the name of its author. But it is quite too probable that he had made up his mind to sacrifice his own opinions respecting the drama to the popular taste; and if the constraint he thus laid upon himself was one of the causes of his failure, it only affords another ground for our interest in the fate of one whose whole career was so deeply marked with trials and calamity.[153]

[153] There can be little doubt, I think, that this was the
case, if we compare the opinions expressed by the canon on the
subject of the drama in the 48th chapter of the First Part of
Don Quixote, 1605, and the opinions in the opening of the third
_jornada_ of the “Baños de Argel,” 1615.

But the life of Cervantes, with all its troubles and sufferings, was now fast drawing to a close. In October of the same year, 1615, he published the Second Part of his Don Quixote; and in its Dedication to the Count de Lemos, who had for some time favored him,[154] he alludes to his failing health, and intimates that he hardly looked for the continuance of life beyond a few months. His spirits, however, which had survived his sufferings in the Levant, at Algiers, and in prisons at home, and which, as he approached his seventieth year, had been sufficient to produce a work like the Second Part of Don Quixote, did not forsake him, now that his strength was wasting away under the influence of disease and old age. On the contrary, with unabated vivacity he urged forward his romance of “Persiles and Sigismunda”; anxious only that life enough should be allowed him to finish it, as the last offering of his gratitude to his generous patron. In the spring he went to Esquivias, where was the little estate he had received with his wife, and after his return wrote a Preface to his unpublished romance, full of a delightful and simple humor, in which he tells a pleasant story of being overtaken in his ride back to Madrid by a medical student, who gave him much good advice about the dropsy, under which he was suffering; to which he replied, that his pulse had already warned him that he was not to live beyond the next Sunday. “And so,” says he, at the conclusion of this remarkable Preface, “farewell to jesting, farewell my merry humors, farewell my gay friends, for I feel that I am dying, and have no desire but soon to see you happy in the other life.”

[154] It has been generally conceded that the Count de Lemos and
the Archbishop of Toledo favored and assisted Cervantes; the
most agreeable proof of which is to be found in the Dedication
of the Second Part of Don Quixote. I am afraid, however, that
their favor was a little too much in the nature of alms. Indeed,
it is called _limosna_ the only time it is known to be mentioned
by any contemporary of Cervantes. See Salas Barbadillo, in the
Dedication of the “Estafeta del Dios Momo,” Madrid, 1627, 12mo.

In this temper he prepared to meet death, as many Catholics of strong religious impressions were accustomed to do at that time;[155] and, on the 2d of April, entered the order of Franciscan friars, whose habit he had assumed three years before at Alcalá. Still, however, his feelings as an author, his vivacity, and his personal gratitude did not desert him. On the 18th of April he received the extreme unction, and the next day wrote a Dedication of his “Persiles y Sigismunda” to the Count de Lemos, marked, to an extraordinary degree, with his natural humor, and with the solemn thoughts that became his situation.[156] The last known act of his life, therefore, shows that he still possessed his faculties in perfect serenity, and four days afterwards, on the 23d of April, 1616, he died, at the age of sixty-eight.[157] He was buried, as he probably had desired, in the convent of the Nuns of the Trinity; but a few years afterwards this convent was removed to another part of the city, and what became of the ashes of the greatest genius of his country is, from that time, wholly unknown.[158]

[155]
“Who, to be sure of Paradise,
Dying put on the weeds of Dominic,
Or in Franciscan think to pass disguised.”

[156] The only case I recollect at all parallel is that of
the graceful Dedication of Addison’s works to his friend and
successor in office, Secretary Craggs, which is dated June 4,
1719; thirteen days before his death. But the Dedication of
Cervantes is much more genial and spirited.

[157] Bowle says, (Anotaciones á Don Quixote, Salisbury, 1781,
4to, Prólogo ix., note), that Cervantes died on the same day with
Shakspeare; but this is a mistake, the calendar not having then
been altered in England, and there being, therefore, a difference
between that and the Spanish calendar of ten days.

[158] Nor was any monument raised to Cervantes, in Spain, until
1835, when a bronze statue of him larger than life, cast at Rome
by Solá of Barcelona, was placed in the Plaza del Estamento at
Madrid. (See El Artista, a journal published at Madrid, 1834,
1835, Tom. I. p. 205; Tom. II. p. 12; and Semanario Pintoresco,
1836, p. 249.) Before this I believe there was nothing that
approached nearer to a monument in honor of Cervantes throughout
the world than an ordinary medal of him, struck in 1818, at
Paris, as one of a large series which would have been absurdly
incomplete without it; and a small medallion or bust, that was
placed in 1834, at the expense of an individual, over the door
of the house in the Calle de los Francos, where he died. But, in
saying this, I ought to add,--whether in praise or censure,--that
I believe the statue of Cervantes was the first erected in Spain
to honor a man of letters or science.