Chapter II: Part 2

Into the profession of letters Cervantes carried a

principle and a philosophy as commendable and ennobling as the ambition that had sustained him in the profession of arms. “It is laudable,” he declared, “for a poet to employ his pen in a virtuous cause,” and he preached nothing that he did not practise consistently. “Let him direct the shafts of satire against vice,” he continued, “in all its various forms, but not level them at individuals; like some who, rather than not indulge their mischievous wit will hazard a disgraceful banishment to the Isles of Pontus. If the poet be correct in his morals, his verse will partake of the same purity; the pen is the tongue of the mind, and what his conceptions are, such will be his productions.”

And so, with these high ideals in his mind, and but few pieces in his wallet, he married on 12th December, 1584, with Dona Catalina de Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano, a young lady of good family, and in worldly substance the superior of her husband. The tenth of his fortune, which Cervantes settled upon his wife, amounted to 100 ducats, while an inventory of the bride’s effects include several plantations of young vines in the district of Esquívias, a small town of New Castile; six bushels of meal and one of wheat at eight reals, or 1s. 8d.; some articles of household furniture; two linen and three cotton sheets, a cushion and two pillows stuffed with wool; one good blanket, and one worn; tables, chairs, pots, and pans; a brasier, a grater, several jars, sacred images, in alabaster and silver gilt; a crucifix, two little images of the baby Jesus; four beehives, forty-five hens and pullets, and one cock. The lady who brought these curiously varied articles into the common stock bore Cervantes no children, survived him over ten years, and was buried, at her request, at her husband’s side in the convent of the Trinitarian nuns. And in these few lines, her story, so far as we know it, is told.

For a few months Cervantes continued to live at Esquívias, and in 1585 we find him removed to Madrid, where his household consisted, in addition to his wife and his little daughter, Isabel, his widowed sister, Andrea, and her eight-year-old daughter, Constanza. Letters had not then become a recognised profession, and in the domain of poetry, amateurism was a disease. Tinkers, tailors, soldiers, sailors--all rhymed unceasingly. Lope de Vega, who was of the number, wrote: “In every street 4,000 poets;” and Cervantes, in his _Voyage around Parnassus_, refers to “the vulgar squadron of seven-month poets, 20,000 strong, whose being is a mystery.” Lope de Vega, then, as always, more fortunate than Cervantes, a youth of twenty-three, already famous as a poet and a libertine, was acting as the confidential secretary of the young Duke of Alva. His dissolute life, which occasionally brought him into conflict with the authorities was, on the whole, far more to his advancement than was the virtuous rectitude of Cervantes, and it is possible that the jealousy and rancour with which the

younger dramatist followed his less affluent but more gifted rival was inspired by the knowledge of his purity in his life and his works. Their careers for awhile progressed along the same lines, but with Cervantes always in the van. They were writing innumerable verses at the same period; but while Lope de Vega, following the custom of the day, lampooned his colleagues, and levelled foul and venemous sonnets at his contemporaries, Cervantes steadily set his face against the practice. He had laid down a rule for his own guidance, from which he never diverged. He can jest a brother poet and banter the foibles of the writers of his day with gentle irony and good humour, but he reserves his censure and his sarcasm for the castigation of evil, vice and folly.

If, as seems more than probable, the relations between Cervantes and Vega were strained, their differences could have had no origin in the attitude of the former. It is true that in _Don Quixote_ the literary artifices and affectations of Lope de Vega are treated with benignant banter, and the bad taste and vulgarity which he indulged in many of his plays came in for some severe and judicious criticism, but in the same place other of his dramas are selected for special praise, and the dramatist is eulogised as “that most happy genius of these kingdoms, who has composed such an infinite number of plays with so much glory, with so much grace, such elegant verse, such choice language, such weighty sentiments--so rich in eloquence and loftiness of style, as that the world is filled with his renown.”

In return for this eulogy, and many other flattering references, Lope de Vega has mentioned Cervantes’ name exactly four times in print, and then only in cold and restrained terms; and in a letter written to his late patron, the Duke of Sessa, he disclosed his animus in the following item of news: “Of poets I speak not. Many are in the bud for next year, but there are none so bad as Cervantes, or so foolish as to praise _Don Quixote_.” It was inevitable that a man of the disposition of Vega, whom his friend, Alarcon, has described as “the universal envier of the applause given to others,” should have envied the fame and genius of Cervantes, who, as Mr. Watts has written, was “of a temper the sweetest among men of genius, who had come through the fiery ordeal of a life of hardship with a heart unsoured as with honour unblemished.” As poet and novelist, Cervantes outdistanced the younger writer in public estimation, and as the author of _Don Quixote_, he soared to a height which has been unattained by any other Spanish novelist; in the realm of the drama alone Lope de Vega was paramount.

It has been seen that Cervantes early acquired a taste for theatrical representations, and at the close of the sixteenth century he doubtless turned to this style of composition as offering the only available means of making an income. Between 1585 and 1588 he wrote and produced between twenty and

thirty plays, and claimed, on insufficient grounds, to have introduced several important changes in the material of stage representations. The trick of introducing allegorical characters among the sublunary personages, which Cervantes assumes as one of his improvements, was in practice in the old miracle plays, and his further pretention to having reduced the number of acts from five to three had been done long before by Avendano. Indeed it is possible that Cervantes produced no more than a number of respectable pieces which gained their full mead of popularity; and we know that his rate of payment, which averaged 800 reals per play, was equal to that received by Vega at any period of his career. But of his dramas only two have outlived their day--_La Numancia_ and _El Trato de Argel_.

_La Numancia_, a play dealing with the famous siege of Numantia by the Romans, was subsequently acted at Zaragoza, in 1808, to inspire the besieged inhabitants to a last desperate effort, a device which succeeded so well that the French were driven from the battlements in the very moment of victory, and the city was saved. _El Trato de Argel_, in which Cervantes stages episodes in his captivity in Algeria, is a poorly-constructed, ineffective, and tedious piece of work, which gives one furiously to think that if the plays of our author won favour, it could only have been at a time when competition was weak or non-existent. Matos Fragoso, a dramatist who flourished a century later, alludes to the “famous comedies of the ingenious Cervantes,” but of contemporary criticism we have none; and Cervantes, in his prologue to his _Eight Comedies and Eight Interludes_, published in 1614, claims for his plays, with characteristic reticence: “They all ran their course without hisses, cries, or disturbances. They were all repeated without receiving tribute of cucumbers or any other missiles.” Of the lost _La Confusa_ (The Perplexed Lady), the dramatist speaks with particular satisfaction as ranking “good among the best of the comedies of the Cloak and Sword, which had been, up to that time, acted.” Well, the Spaniards are a conservative people, and to-day one may witness in that country, performances of stage plays that are listened to without the disconcerting accompaniment of the hurtling cucumbers, but which in an English theatre would be received with all manner of unfriendly disapprobation.

As a playwright, Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly refuses to take Cervantes seriously, and he asserts that it “requires the eye of faith to see any high form of dramatic talent in the examples which have come down to us.” But even as Richilieu plumed himself more upon his small gift as a poet than his genius as a statesman, and as Napoleon turned from the planning of world conquests to revise the regulations of the Theâtre Française, so Cervantes appears to have been observed with an ambition to shine in the realms of theatrical art. He was, as his biographer points out, ready at the invitation of

the manager to supply “tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral ... and so contagious, so irresistible was his sublime self-confidence, that he actually persuaded managers into a belief in him.” And, despite the modesty of his prefaces there is no grounds for challenging the truth of Mr. Kelly’s conclusion that Cervantes was immensely proud of his dramatic work. “No man,” says this writer, “was more sublimely confident of the sincerity of his own mission; no man more certain that he deserved success. Years afterwards, when he had found his true way, when the fame of the author of _Don Quixote_ was gone abroad in every land, he still turned his wistful eyes to the memory of the days when he had hoped to win immortality upon the stage. Nor does he ever seemed to have imagined that the cause of failure lay in himself. Even his hopeful spirit was a little staggered by the knowledge that his plays could get no hearing. That was a fact which no amount of self-delusion could blink; and Cervantes accounted for it by assuming, not that his plays were poor, but that he had fallen on evil days.”

Cervantes, according to Mr. Watts’s computation, was writing for the stage two years before Lope de Vega made his appearance as a dramatist. But the younger man carried everything in the theatrical world before him from the first. He came, and saw, and conquered, and Cervantes was swept from the arena by his triumphant onrush. “I gave up the pen and comedies,” Cervantes admits, “and there entered presently that prodigy of nature, the great Lope de Vega, and assumed the dramatic throne. He subjected all the actors, and placed them under his jurisdiction. He filled the world with comedies--suitable, felicitous, and well-worded--and so many that those in writing exceeded 10,000 sheets, all of which have been represented.” Cervantes scarcely overstated the fecundity of his rival. Vega flooded the theatres of Spain with an unending stream of plays of every description, and Montalvon records of this prodigy that he could turn out a comedy of more than 2,400 lines, complete with plot, dialogue, and stage directions, in twenty-four hours. In forty years he wrote upwards of eighteen hundred three-act comedies, besides poems, stories, and other literary exercises, of which, outside the little circle of savants and students, not half-a-dozen are to-day remembered even by name. Unless he was really the author of the false second part of _Don Quixote_, it may be said that not a line of Lope de Vega’s prodigious output is now either read or discussed.

With the star of Lope de Vega in the ascendant Cervantes found his stage occupation gone, and he appears to have cast about for some other employment that would enable him to support his household. While he was turning out plays at the rate of eight to ten a year, his income, if not large, was at least sufficient for his modest requirements; but the

possibility of being able to make a competence by his pen in any other branch of letters impressed him so little that he removed his family to Seville, and re-entered the king’s service in a civil capacity. The next twenty years were to be the hardest and the leanest in his hard, lean life, and during all this time he wrote little and published nothing. His appointment as a commissary is signed 12th June, 1588, and by virtue of his office he was engaged in the purchase of grain and oil for the provisioning of the fleets and armaments of the Indies. Many receipts, invoices, and official papers written out by Cervantes in a clear, bold hand are in existence, though not a line of his other manuscripts has been preserved. His official duties were uncongenial and poorly paid, and in 1590 he addressed the memorial to the king, which amplifies and confirms our record of his military service. In this memorial, he “prays and beseeches humbly, so far as he can, that your Majesty should bestow on him the favour of a place in the Indies, of the three or four which are now vacant, one of them the accountantship of the new kingdom of Granada, or the governorship of the province of Soconuso in Guatemala, or treasurer of the galleys of Carthagena, or magistrate of the city of La Paz.” If the king considered this petition seriously, and examined the qualifications that Cervantes possessed for the discharge of treasury or accountancy duties, and if he came to the conclusion that such offices could be more capably filled by other and less deserving men, the world will scarcely question his judgment. For although our author emerged from all his misfortunes with an honourable name and an unblemished reputation, it must be confessed that the incapacity he betrayed in the execution of his official tasks proved him unequal to the responsibilities of a more exalted official position. His naturally liberal disposition, his unmethodical habits, and his quixotic confidence in his fellow-men, were so many disabilities in the equipment of a commissary and tax-collector under Philip II.

The good nature and bad luck which at all times militated against the success of Cervantes, thwarted his civil aspirations; but his first incarceration, which occurred in 1592, arose from an excess of zeal on behalf of the Royal Treasury. He overlooked the important fact that the clergy were exempt from taxation, and for the heinous offence of laying an embargo on wheat belonging to a priest, he served a term of three months in the prison of Castro del Rio, of Ecija. In 1595 he won the prize of three silver spoons for the best set of verses written in honour of San Jacinto on the occasion of his canonisation at Zaragoza; and in the following year he was again thrown into prison, this time through the defalcation of an agent, by whom he remitted a sum of 7,400 _reals_ from Seville to Madrid. As his official salary was only 3,000 _reals_ a year, such a liability must have appeared to him to be practically indischargeable. But by the recovery of 2,600 _reals_

from the estate of his defaulting agent, Cervantes obtained his liberty; and although he was re-arrested at a later period for delay in his repayments of the balance, his personal rectitude was in no way impugned.

But while his days were full of petty duties and financial troubles, he appeared to have found leisure for literary exercises, and there can be no doubt but that during these dead years he wrote the majority of his novels. If, however, he attempted to find a publisher for his work his efforts were ineffectual, and his fortunes fell to such a low ebb that he was dependant at times upon the benevolence of his friends for the necessities of life. Two sonnets, which he wrote about this period, are considered the best examples of his skill in this style of composition that have come down to us. In the one he ridicules the incredible delay of the great Duke of Medina Sidonia in coming to the relief of Cadiz after that city had been destroyed by the English, under Lord Howard of Effingham and the Earl of Essex, and in the other he satirises the extravagant splendour and “profane magnificence” which was lavished on the catafalque of Philip II. in Seville.

The exact date on which Cervantes made his home in La Mancha, and the circumstances which governed his change of habitation, are unknown. That he had resigned, or lost, his post of commissary is evident, since we find him employed by the Grand Priory of San Juan, in the collection of overdue rents in the neighbourhood of Argamasilla. The exercise of such a calling would naturally make him unpopular with the local community; but whether his duties would in themselves bring him under the notice of the authorities, or whether, as it is said, he supplemented his unwelcome office by satirising the chief citizens, it is practically certain that he was seized and imprisoned for several weeks. In a letter he wrote to an uncle praying for assistance in this new affliction, he says, “Long days and troubled nights are wearing me out in this cell, or I should say cavern”; and if the underground cellar in the _Casa de Medrano_, which is still pointed out to visitors, was the scene of his durance, his condition was not overstated. _Don Quixote_ was, it is generally believed, “engendered in this prison,” but since the cell is too dark for the exercise of penmanship, it may be presumed that the author whiled away his solitude by moulding and rehearsing the scenes in his mind. But it is as well to bear in mind that Mr. Kelly has cast grave doubts upon the authenticity of this letter. The original is unknown; Sánchez Liaño himself, who is responsible for the story, states that he only had a copy of it; the fact that it was written from Argamasilla is unsupported; and his biographer asserts that there is not a jot of absolute evidence to prove that Cervantes ever suffered imprisonment at Argamasilla at all. But though the story rests chiefly upon tradition, it has a savour of veracity about it; and while it neither adds to or detracts

from the fame of Cervantes, it is one of those stories which the public will not lightly relinquish.

Near by the house in the _Casa de Medrano_ stands the parish church of Argamasilla, where, in one of the side chapels, hangs a picture, representing a lady and gentleman kneeling devoutly before a vision of the Virgin. The gentleman has a typical Spanish caste of countenance, with high cheek bones and lantern jaws, a dust complexion, wandering eyes, and large moustachios. The inscription beneath the portraits explains that the gentleman had been cured by Our Lady of a mental affliction, and that the young, and not uncomely, lady by his side was his niece. The donor of the picture, whose lineaments are portrayed therein, was one, Rodrigo Pacheco, who was the owner of the house in the _Casa de Medrano_ at the time that Cervantes sojourned in La Mancha. It was probably by Pacheco’s order that Cervantes was lodged in the dungeon beneath his house. Upon these traditional particulars the good people of Argamasilla have based their legend, which identifies Cervantes with their city, and makes one of their leading citizens the original of _Don Quixote_. If the legend be true, and there would appear to be no substantial reason for doubting it, we may dismiss the idea that the author had departed from the principles he laid down as worthy of adoption by all writers. Supposing that he selected this individual as the victim of his satirical bent, we may learn from the affection with which he develops the character of the afflicted knight, how little of rancour and uncharitableness had place in his heart. It must be conceded that he made merry at the expense of the Manchegans and their customs, but he did it with so glad a humour, and such gentle sarcasm, that La Mancha to-day is proud of the fame it has achieved in his immortal pages, and reveres the memory of their adopted townsman as piously as if he were their patron Saint. But if, as internal evidence gives some excuse for believing, _Don Quixote_ was commenced before the death of Philip II., this interesting and circumstantially-proved legend becomes no more than a literary tradition, since that monarch had died before Cervantes quitted Seville.

The only authenticated detail that we have of Cervantes’ career between 1598 and 1602 is this incident of his imprisonment at Argamasilla. When next we hear of him, in 1603, he is among the unrewarded soldiers and unrecognised men of letters who crowded the outer precincts of the Court of Philip III., at Valladolid. The king, though priest-ridden, and lacking in force of character, was not devoid of a kindly tolerance for learning, but the crumbs of royal favour were distributed by the ostentatious and uncultured Duke of Lerma, who despised literature, and had his own ends to serve by the allocation of the kingly bounty. From Lerma, as far as his biographers can discover, Cervantes received nothing; but in the Duke of Béjar--a nobleman, distinguished in arms and in poesy, and in his

love of romances of chivalry, such as were still the vogue in Spain--he found a patron. But the Duke might almost have been described as an hereditary patron of works of chivalry, and when he learned the nature and object of _Don Quixote_, for which the influence of his name had been obtained, he withdrew his patronage. Cervantes prevailed upon the Duke to listen to the reading of a chapter from the book before making his decision absolute, and, according to Vicente de los Rios, who is responsible for the story, his Grace was so delighted with the humour and humanity of the history, that he reversed his verdict, and consented to accept the dedication. The king’s printer, Francisco de Robles, having secured a ten years’ copyright in the work, the privilege of publication was granted on 26th September, 1604, and the book was issued from the press of Juan de la Cuesta, at Madrid, in January, 1605.

The success of “the book of humanity,” as Sainte-Beuve has happily described _Don Quixote_, was instantaneous and unprecedented, up to that date, in the world of letters. Spain rang with admiration and plaudits of this inspired story-teller and of the story, the like of which had never before been told. In an age when readers were few, the book was widely read, and in a country where the buying of books was a limited indulgence, the book sold in its thousands. Mr. Watts estimates that no fewer than 4,000 copies went into circulation in 1605. Copies of six editions, published in that year, are extant--Madrid, Lisbon, and Valencia each being responsible for two editions within a few months of its first appearance. So competent an authority as Señor Gayangos is of opinion that further impressions were printed at Barcelona, Pamplona, and Zaragoza. Prior to the publication of _Don Quixote_, no masterpiece of fiction had ever found so enthusiastic a public, or a sale so enormous. It became in a flash the common-place book of the nation. Cervantes tells us, through the mouth of the Bachelor Carrasco, in the Second Part, which was not published until ten years later: “I do not in the least doubt but at this day there have been published about 12,000 of it. Portugal, Barcelona, and Valencia, where they have been printed, can witness that, if there were occasion. It is said that it is also now in the press at Antwerp. And I verily believe there is scarce a language into which it is not to be translated.” In the same forty-fourth Chapter of the Second Part, the rightly proud and complacent author speaks no more than the literal truth when he says of it: “The author has made everything so plain that there is nothing in that book but what anyone may understand. Children handle it, youngsters read it, grown men understand it, and old people applaud it. In short, it is universally so thumbed, so gleaned, so studied, and so known, that if the people do but see a lean horse, they presently cry, ‘There goes Rozinante.’ But no

description of persons is so devoted to it as your pages; there is not a nobleman’s ante-chamber in which you will not find a _Don Quixote_. If one lays it down, another takes it up; while one is asking for it, another one snatches it; in short, this history affords the most pleasing and least prejudicial entertainment that ever was published, for there is not so much as the appearance of an immodest word in it, nor a thought that is not entirely catholic.”

Concerning the publication and popularity of _Don Quixote_, many stories of varying degrees of improbability have sprung up, and are common to most of the biographies of Cervantes. But the following incident, showing that “even in his lifetime the author obtained the glory of having his work receive a royal approbation,” is culled from an anonymous “tract” published in 1853. The author does not quote any authority for the narrative, which I have not encountered elsewhere. “As Philip III.,” says this chronicler, “was standing in a balcony of his palace at Madrid, viewing the country, he observed a student on the banks of the river Manzanares reading in a book, and from time to time breaking off and beating his forehead with extraordinary tokens of pleasure and delight; upon which the king observed to those about him: ‘That scholar is either mad, or he is reading _Don Quixote_.’ The biographer rounds up his story with the gratifying assurance that ‘the latter proved to be the case.’”

It must not be supposed that, amid the almost universal applause which welcomed the appearance of _Don Quixote_, some discordant notes were not heard. People of fashion, whose chief literary recreation was the reading of the very books of chivalry, which Cervantes so boldly and humourously satirised, regarded it with cold displeasure; the clergy frowned upon it, and rival authors professed to find it vulgar, unbecoming, and absurd. But its popularity increased, despite, if not even by reason of these captious criticisms, and the object of the author in writing it gave rise to more speculation and disputings than the interpretation of Ibsen has provoked in recent times. Cervantes himself declared that he compiled his romance for the purpose of “causing the false and silly books of chivalries to be abhorred by mankind,” and in the attainment of this object he was wholly successful. The publication of such romances suddenly ceased; the writing of them was abandoned; the creation of these lovelorn shepherds and shepherdesses, and of impossible cavaliers was arrested as if by magic. And having marked the effect of the book, the public sought for some hidden intention that was supposed to work behind the author’s pages, and were content to find it in the character of the Knight of La Mancha. They concluded that _Don Quixote_ was intended to satirise someone; but whom? Was it the prosaic sovereign, Charles V., who was here held up to ridicule, or the least romantic King Philip II., or that contemptuous and unlettered disburser of royal

favours, the Duke of Lerma? But the people who hazarded such wild guesses must have failed to detect the subtle delicacy and nobility of the knight’s nature, and the loving sympathy with which Cervantes dwells upon the wisdom and sterling merit of his hero. Could a man satirise an enemy with such gentleness and affection? Could a genius like Cervantes so far overshoot his bolt as to make not only the other characters in the book, but all the reading world, honour and love the figure that he purposed to hold up to ridicule?

If Cervantes, in writing _Don Quixote_, was laughing away Spain’s chivalry, as Lord Byron erroneously declared, then he was the target of his own destructive cynicism, for the story of his career is that of a man who practised a chivalry which was already extinct in Spain, and maintained unswervingly a code of honour which had fallen into desuetude. If Montesquieu’s similarly extravagant comment that “the Spaniards have but one book--that which has made all the others ridiculous” comes nearer to the truth, it must be conceded that the romances which Cervantes exterminated were scarcely worth preserving. But the book affords also another proof that truth surpasses fiction in strangeness, since the popularity of _Don Quixote_, its effect, and its immortality surprised no one so much as its author. Having disposed of his rights in the publication to Francisco de Robles--the sum he obtained for them is nowhere mentioned, but it may be surmised that it was all too small for his need--Cervantes proceeded about his daily task of providing bread for his family, and left this “child of his sterile, ill-cultured wit” to its fate. He remained in Valladolid while his book was being printed at Madrid, and the number of glaring and absurd errors that marred the first edition is proof positive that he did not see a single sheet. Many of these more palpable blunders were absent from the 1608 edition which was revised by the author, who was then resident in the capital.

Mr. Watts, who has evidently made a close and scholarly study of the old romances of chivalry which _Don Quixote_ brought into such sudden disfavour, has endeavoured, as I think, with much plausibility, to demonstrate Cervantes’ precise attitude towards this class of literature. Having traced the romantic vein from its genesis to the time when the author of _Galatea_ employed it as his model, and eulogised in high terms such examples of the genre as _Amadis of Gaul_ and _Palmerin of England_, Mr. Watts points out that Cervantes carefully differentiated between the romances of merit and the nautiating imitations; that he was one of the most omniverious readers of such books in that age, and the most deeply-imbued with their spirit. He specially and enthusiastically praises the good volumes among the bad in Don Quixote’s library; he praises again, through the mouth of the Canon of Toledo, the feeling of romances of chivalry, and lays down the rules on which such a history should be written. If he had

any other object in composing _Don Quixote_ than to “write out of the fulness of his own heart,” it was to check the perpetration of fatuous and mischievous stories which were bringing into disrepute and ridicule his old and well-loved stories of chivalry and romance. The secret of the enduring success of _Don Quixote_, Mr. Watts concludes, is not to be found in its motive, but in the fact that the romance was drawn from the story of the author’s own life. “The hero himself, the enthusiast, nursed on visions of chivalry, who is ever mocked by fortune; the reviver of the old knighthood, who is buffeted by clowns and made sport of by the baser sort; who, in spite of the frequent blows, jeers, reverses, and indignities he receives, never ceases to command our love and sympathy--who is he but the man of Lepanto himself, whose life is a romance at least as various, eventful, and arduous; as full of hardships, troubles, and sadness; as prolific of surprising adventures and strange accidents as the immortal story he has written? This is the key to _Don Quixote_, which, unless we use, we shall not reach the heart of the mystery.”

Let us linger for awhile with Cervantes in the great square and broad streets of Valladolid. To-day, Valladolid, “the Rich,” is a fallen city. Here still stand the old Royal Palace, upon which Cervantes’ eyes must so often have rested--a ruin. The great Cathedral, an imposing mass of granite, which was begun in 1585, is still unfinished. Here still stand the house in the Calle de Colon, in which Columbus died; and Cervantes’ own lodging at No. 14, Calle de Rastro; and the huge Plaza Major where, on October 7th, 1559, Philip II. celebrated the first memorable Auto de Fé, and which was, in Cervantes’ day, the meeting place of all the poets and soldiers, the historians and savants, who haunted the Court of His Most Religious Majesty. Here Cervantes remained while his work circulated throughout the country, and overflowed into every country in Europe.

Would you know the social conditions that prevailed in Spain in the latter half of the sixteenth century? You can obtain the information in “_The Life and Achievement of Don Quixote de la Mancha_.” If you would have wit and wisdom, or if you would take humanity to be your study, you have only to turn to this same work. If you seek to realise the condition under which a man bore arms, or wielded a pen, under that royal barbarian, Philip II., you must have resource to this history. Would you understand Cervantes’ own experience in arms and in letters? Turn to Chapter xxxi. of the First Part of _Don Quixote_. What higher ideal ever had any man, both for the soldier and the writer? Listen to the Don in what Cervantes assures his readers is his hero’s most rational and logical humour: “Now the end and design of letters,” he says, “is to regulate distributive justice, and give to every man his due; to institute good laws, and cause

them to be strictly observed; an end most certainly generous and exalted, and worthy of high commendation; but not equal to that which is annexed to the profession of arms, the object and end of which is peace, the greatest blessing mortals can wish for in this wearisome life.”

The purpose of letters has never been placed on a higher standard, and militarism is robbed of its sordidness in his definition of its aims. Cervantes was a soldier and an author by trade, let us listen to his verdict when, granting that the end of war is peace, and that in this it has the advantage of the end proposed by letters, he weighs the labours of the scholar against those of the warrior, and decides on which side the balance turns.

“I say then,” he asserts, “that the hardships of the scholar are these: in the first place poverty; not that they are all poor, but I would put the case in the strongest manner possible; and when I have mentioned that the scholar endures poverty, no more need be said to evince his misery; for he that is poor is destitute of every good thing, he has to contend with misery in all its forms, sometimes in hunger, sometimes in cold, sometimes in nakedness, and sometimes in all these together. Yet his necessity is not so great but that still he eats, though somewhat later than usual, either by partaking of the rich man’s scraps and leavings, or, which is his greatest misery, by going a sopping. Neither does he always want the fireside or chimney-corner of some charitable person, where, if he is not quite warmed, at least the extreme cold is abated; and, lastly, at night he sleeps under cover. I will not mention other trifles, such as want of linen, deficiency of shoes, his thin and threadbare clothes, not the surfeits to which he is liable from intemperance, when good fortune sets a plentiful table in his way. By this path, rough and difficult as I have described it, now stumbling, now falling, now rising, then falling and rising again, do scholars arrive at last to the end of their wishes; which, being attained, we have seen many who, having passed these Syrtes, these Scyllas, these Charybdisis, buoyed up, as it were, by a favourable tide, have exercised authority from a chair of state, and governed the world; their hunger converted into satiety, their pinching cold into refreshing coolness, their nakedness into embroidered raiment, and their bare mats to beds of down, with furniture of fine holland and damask, a reward justly merited by their virtues.

“But their hardships, when fairly brought together and compared, fall short of those of the warrior, as I shall presently demonstrate. Since, in speaking of the scholar, we began with his poverty and its several branches, let us see how it is with the soldier in that respect, and we shall find that such is his lot poverty itself is not poorer, for he depends on his wretched pay, which comes late, or perhaps never, or what he can plunder, with great peril both of life and conscience. Sometimes his want of clothing is

such that his slashed buff doublet serves him both for doublet and for shirt; and in the midst of Winter, being in the open field, he has nothing but the breath of his mouth to warm him, which, issuing from an empty stomach, must needs be cold, against all the rules of Nature. But come, Night, and let us see whether bed will make amends for these inconveniences. If it be not his own fault, it will never offend in point of narrowness, for he may measure out as many feet of earth as he pleases, and roll himself thereon at leisure, without fear of rumpling the sheets.

“Suppose, again, the day and hour arrived of taking the degree of his profession. I mean, suppose the day of battle come, wherein he is to put in practice the exercise of his profession, and strike to gain some new honour, then, as a mark of distinction, shall his head be dignified by a cap made of lint, to stop a hole made by a bullet, or perhaps be carried off maimed, at the expense of a leg or arm. And if this do not happen, but that merciful Heaven preserve his life and limbs, it may fall out that he shall remain as poor as before, and must run through many encounters and battles, nay, always come off victorious, to obtain some small preferment--and these miracles, too, are rare--but, I pray tell me, if ever you made it your observation, how few are those who obtain due rewards in war, in comparison of those numbers who perish? Doubtless you will answer that there is no parity between them, that the dead cannot be reckoned up; whereas those who live and are rewarded may be numbered with three figures.

“It is quite otherwise with scholars, not only those who follow the lead, but others also, who all either by hook or by crook get a livelihood; so that though the soldier’s sufferings be much greater, yet his reward is much less. To this it may be answered, that it is easier to reward two thousand scholars than thirty thousand soldiers, because the former are recompensed at the expense of the public, by giving them employment, but the latter cannot be gratified but at the cost of the master that employs them: yet this very difficulty makes good my argument. Now for a man to attain to an eminent degree of learning costs him time, watching, hunger, nakedness, dizziness in the head, weakness in the stomach, and other inconveniences, which are the consequence of those, of which I have already in part made mention. But the rising gradually to be a good soldier is purchased at the whole expense of all that is required for learning, and that in so surpassing a degree that there is no comparison betwixt them, because he is every moment in danger of his life. To what danger or distress can a scholar be reduced equal to that of a soldier, who, being besieged in some strong place, and at his post in some ravelin or bastion, perceives the enemy carrying on a mine under him, and yet must upon no account remove from thence, or shun the danger which threatens him? All he can do is to give notice to his commander that he may countermine, but must himself stand still, fearing and expecting when on a sudden he shall soar to the clouds without wings, and be again cast down headlong against his will. If this danger seems inconsiderable, let us see whether there be not greater when two galleys shock one another with their prows in the midst of the spacious sea. When they have thus grappled, and are clinging together, the soldier is confined to the narrow gangway, being a board not above two feet wide; and yet though he sees before him so many ministers of death threatening, as there are pieces of cannon on the other side pointing against him, and not half a pike’s length from his body; and being sensible that the first slip of his feet sends him to the bottom of Neptune’s dominions--still, for all this, inspired by honour, with an undaunted heart, he stands a mark to so much fire, and endeavours to make his way by that narrow passage into the enemy’s vessel. But what is most to be admired is, that no sooner one falls, where he shall never rise till the end of the world, than another steps into the same place; and if he also drops into the sea, which lies in wait for him like an enemy, another, and after him another, stills fills up the place, without suffering any interval of time to separate their deaths, a resolution and boldness scarce to be paralleled in any other trials of war. Blessed be those happy ages that were strangers to the dreadful fury of those devilish instruments of artillery which is the cause that very often a cowardly, base hand takes away the life of the bravest gentleman; and that in the midst of that vigour and resolution which animates and inflames the bold, a chance bullet (shot perhaps by one that fled, and was frightened at the very flash which the mischievous piece gave when it went off) coming nobody knows how or from whence, in a moment puts a period to the brave designs and the life of one that deserved to have survived many years.”

I have quoted thus freely because the passage illustrates better than pages of comment, the high ideals that inspired Cervantes both in the tented field and in the long solitude of his poor study. He fought as he wrote like a Christian gentleman; and if, in his lifetime, arms did not bring him honours, nor letters riches, posterity is agreed to recognise in him one of the truest soldiers and greatest writers of all times. It was his persistent evil chance which, when he had abandoned the perilous calling of a warrior, should dog his steps with sufferings from which the writer is usually exempt. In June, 1605 within a month or two of the publication of _Don Quixote_, a court gallant, Don Gaspar de Ezpeleta, was suddenly assailed by two men, wounded and left for dead in the street before Cervantes’ house. The author and his family hearing his cries carried the stricken man into their lodging, where he died in a few hours. Justice, in taking up the affair, clapped

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_Paris, 1622._

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Cervantes and his family in gaol, where they were detained until the result of the inquiry exonerated them from playing anything but the Samaritan’s part in the matter. This too, as Edmondo de Amicis reflects, had to fall to the lot of the poor author of _Don Quixote_, so that he could be said to have experienced every kind of trial.

“We crossed the Mancha,” writes de Amicis in another reference to Cervantes in his work on _Spain_, “the celebrated Mancha, the immortal theatre of the adventures of Don Quixote. It is just as I imagined it. There are broad, bare plains, long tracts of sandy earth, some windmills, a few miserable villages, solitary paths, and wretched, abandoned houses. On seeing those places I experienced a feeling of melancholy which the perusal of Cervantes’ book always rouses; and I repeated to myself what I always say in reading it: ‘This man cannot make one laugh; or, if he does, under the smile, the tears are springing up.’ Don Quixote is a sad and solemn character; his mania is a lament; his life is the history of the dreams, illusions, disappointments and aberrations of us all; the struggle of reason with the imagination, of the true with the false, the ideal with the real! We all have something of Don Quixote about us; we all take windmills for giants; all are spurred upward from time to time by an impulse of enthusiasm, and driven back by a laugh of disdain; are all a mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous, and feel, with profound bitterness, the perpetual contrast between the greatness of our aspirations and the weakness of our powers.”

One reads the opinion of the eminent Italian author, and it but confirms the opinion that Mr. Watts is doubtless right in his belief that Don Quixote and the man of Lepanto are one and the same.

From the depositions made at this inquiry into the murder of Ezpeleta, which have been preserved, we learn that the family, which was at this time dependent upon Cervantes, consisted of his wife, his natural daughter Isabel, aged twenty; his widowed sister, Andrea, aged sixty-one; a cousin, Dona Magdalena de Sotomayor, a lady of forty; and their servant, Maria. The household followed the Court to Madrid in 1606, where Cervantes found two eminent, if not by any means prodigal, patrons in Bernardo Sandoval y Rojas, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo, and the Conde de Lemos, nephew and son-in-law of the Duke de Lerma. But if the Inquisitor-General, who ranked after the Pope as the most powerful Prelate in Christendom, was not lavish in his disbursements of patrimony, his patronage saved the author from molestation at the hands of the Inquisition, and it was not until the death of Archbishop Sandoval that the Holy Office cast a censorial eye upon _Don Quixote_, and expunged certain passages which did not meet with its approval.

For the next seven years Cervantes appears to have published nothing, and it may be assumed that

_Paris, 1713._

_5th Edition._]

he eked out a precarious existence by undertaking clerical work, and on the occasional alms doled out to him by his patrons. We know, from the evidence given at the inquiry before the Alcade at Valladolid, that he “wrote and transacted business,” and that his slender means were augmented by the sale of needlework made by the women of his household. His fame, as the author of _Don Quixote_, would give him entrance to the intellectual circle of Madrid, and there seems no reason to doubt the statement of his biographer, Navarrete, that he joined the Literary Society, known as the Selvages, which included the most eminent men of letters of Madrid in its membership. We learn that in 1609 he forearmed himself against his burial by becoming a lay brother of the Oratory of the Knights of Grace--a prudent precaution that was customary among men of letters of the time--where he had, as colleagues, Lope de Vega, and his good friend, Francisco de Quevedo, one of the few contemporary writers who never disclosed envy or pretended contempt for the author of _Don Quixote_.

Of some of Cervantes’ other friends at this time it is not possible to speak in the same terms. Lope de Vega was always jealous of his genius and his comparatively limited meed of popularity; Luis de Leon, whom, Cervantes said, “I revere, adore, and follow,” and Fernando de Herrera were dead; Luis de Góngora disliked him, and the brothers Lupercio and Bartolomé Argénsola returned his good-natured eulogies with envy and evil works, and by their intriguing they prevented the Conde de Lemos from redeeming the promise of employment he had made Cervantes when that nobleman was appointed Viceroy of Naples. Cervantes also had friends among the painters of the period, and was warmly attached to the two then celebrated artists, Juan de Jaureguy and Francisco Pacheco. Our author tells us, in his prologue to _Novelas Exemplares_, that Jaureguy had painted his picture, and he also figured among the 170 portraits of eminent contemporaries, which Pacheco made in black and red chalk. This collection, which was presented by the painter to Olivares, the generous art patron and celebrated minister of Philip IV., was broken up after his death, and is now reduced to fifty-six portraits, but that of Cervantes is not among the survivors. Nor has any other pictured memorial of him been preserved. His good-humoured plaint that his publishers should have reproduced an engraving of Jaureguy’s picture on the first leaf of _Novelas Exemplares_ has since been echoed in all sincerity. Two hundred years after his death it suddenly dawned upon Spain that no portrait of this, one of her greatest sons, was in existence, or if such a work existed it has not yet been found.

Lord Carteret, who brought out his handsomely-printed and bound edition of _Don Quixote_ in 1738, was arrested in his efforts on the eve of publication by the discovery that the engraving of Cervantes, which he desired to make his frontispiece, could not be reproduced for want of an original likeness from which to make a copy. The British Ambassador, at Madrid, instituted an energetic search in Spain, but he could find no trace of the pictures which it was known had been painted, and Lord Carteret commissioned William Kent to execute the necessary portrait. Kent followed faithfully the details which the author had revealed of his features and outward appearance in the preface to _Novelas Exemplares_; and in order to fend himself from any charge of deception he labelled it, “Portrait of Miguel de Cervantes by Himself.” William Kent’s imaginary portrait--a three-quarter length painting of a man in the prime of life of the stately and ultra-Spanish type of countenance, splendidly attired in ruffs and frills to resemble an exquisite of the period, has been used as the basis of all subsequent portraits of Cervantes. It is fanciful, somewhat ridiculous--since Cervantes never boasted purple and fine linen for his adornment--incorrect,--for the man of Lepanto’s maimed hand is represented as amputated--and generally misleading. But the conventional portrait and fanciful invention of Kent--the hooked nose, large moustache, round eyes and baby mouth--appealed to the Spanish imagination; and when, in 1780, the Spanish Academy published their own first classical edition of _Don Quixote_, a variant of Kent’s portrait graced the work. They declared, in the first place, that their discovery was from the brush of Alonso del Arco, but when it was pointed out that the deaf and dumb painter was not born until nine years after the death of the author, they declared it a copy of an original painted by one of Cervantes’ contemporaries. When the strong family resemblance between the Alonso de Arco portrait and that of William Kent was insisted upon, the Spanish Academy decided that the English picture was a copy of their discovered prize, and with that explanation they professed themselves entirely contented.

What is probably an equally unauthentic portrait of Cervantes, but one based upon a more ingenious and plausible theory, was unearthed by the energies of Don José Maria Asensio of Seville, who, in an anonymous manuscript, happened upon a note to the effect that in one of six pictures, painted by Pacheco for a convent at Seville, there was a portrait of Cervantes. Armed with this clue, Señor Asensio went to the Provincial Museum of Seville, and made a careful inspection of the pictures which were painted to commemorate the effective labours of the Redemptorist brethren in releasing captives from Algiers. In one of these, entitled “St. Peter of Nola, in one of the Passages of his Life,” the saint is represented as superintending the launching of a boat. Among the half-dozen figures in the foreground, which are declared to be all portraits, is a man under middle age, with a striking head set upon a strong neck and shoulders, and with the defect of the left hand seemingly disguised by obscure

_London, 1738._

_7th Edition._]