Part 3

All sorts of conjectures as to the identity of the lady have been made; but, as Mr. Kelly, with his characteristic common-sense declares, “nothing whatever is known of her; nothing at this day is likely to be discovered about her; and the whole question might be passed over were it not for the _curiosos impertinentes_, the literary ghouls who manifest their interest in high literature by leaving _Don Quixote_ unread, and striving to discover the name of Cervantes’ mistress.”

But Mr. Kelly, in this part, as in one or two other instances in his scholarly _Life of Cervantes_, is inclined to claim less for his hero than he is entitled to. He says here that, “so far as Cervantes himself is concerned in this matter, his biographer must be content to admit that his subject was no saint, but an impetuous man of genius, with quite as full a share of frailty as though he had been a peer.” Yet a study of the career of Cervantes discloses him, if not a saint, at least a man of less frailty than the majority of the world’s great ones; and to suppose him habitually frail because one indiscretion can be attributed to him, seems scarcely generous. Again, in dealing with that period of Cervantes’ life in Valladolid, after the publication of _Don Quixote_, Mr. Kelly says, “He probably had a little money at this time, and, though it would seem that he spent some of it in very undesirable ways, it may be hoped that

the woman of the family no longer needed to take in the sewing from the Marques de Villafranca”; and, in another place, he refers to the “supererogatory folly” which misled him in Valladolid. He bases this supposition on the evidence on a MS., entitled, _Memorias de Valladolid_, now in the British Museum, in which the name of Cervantes is put into the mouth of a woman in a gambling house. As the author was not the only bearer of the name of Cervantes in Spain in that day, and as none of his candid friends refer to his vices or immoralities, either in prose or verse, one might, I think, regard this piece of evidence with more than usual suspicion. Mr. Watts dismisses the charge as unworthy of any credence, and most Cervantists will, doubtless, treat the imputation in the same fashion.

Between his retirement from the Army and the publication of the first, and only published part, of the _Galatea_, Cervantes, on the evidence of his petition to the King, conveyed letters and advices from Mostagan, a Spanish possession on the Coast of Barbary, to Philip, and was sent by His Majesty to Oran, where he was employed in affairs of the fleet, under the orders of Antonio de Guevara. But the nature and duration of his employment are matters of conjecture, and we must turn to 1584 for the next authentic details of his career. In that year our author married a wife, and published the _Galatea_.

The _Galatea_, which was not translated into English until 1867, has enjoyed less vogue in this country than in France, where Florian’s translation is still in demand. In Spain, at least half-a-dozen editions were called for during the lifetime of the author, and so great was the esteem in which it was held at the time, that gentlemen from France, affected to letters, had their _Galatea_ by heart. Cervantes’ _Eclogue_, or, as we should style it, pastoral romance, was not a literary experiment, being an exercise in the manner of Montemayor’s _Diana_, and having its inspiration in the fashion of the period. This “firstfruits of his poor wit,” as the author calls it in his preface, is concerned with shepherds and shepherdesses, their loves, their longings, and their lassitudes. The fable is artificial, the language is stilted, the passion false, and the whole, to modern eyes and ears, is tedious, and not a little ridiculous. That it appealed to the current fancy in poetry and fiction is its excuse; that it was at least equal in merit, if not superior, to any contemporary effort of the same class, is its only substantial merit. Some personal interest the pastoral has in the introduction of real persons under romantic names. Cervantes’ own love story is rehearsed in the prologue, the poet masquerades as Elicio, and his wife as Galatea, while Tirsi, Timbrio, Damon, and Erasteso are all friends of the author. Twenty years later Cervantes made merry over this class of literature, when in _Don Quixote_ he makes the Knight, returning vanquished from the Tourney at Barcelona, propose to Sancho Panza that they shall turn shepherds and lead a rural life. He decides to call himself Quixotis, to re-name his Squire, Pansino and Teresa Panza is to be celebrated in the annal of arcady by the style of Teresania. The objects and employment of the shepherds were to consist of poetry and protestation. “For my part,” the Don declared, “I will complain of absence, thou” (his Squire) “shall celebrate thy own loyalty and constancy, the Shepherd Larrascon shall expostulate on his shepherdess’s disdain, and the Pastor Curiambio choose what subject he likes best; and so all will be managed to our hearts’ content”--even as it was managed by Cervantes in the _Galatea_.

Yet, artificial and uninspiriting as the pastoral appears to-day, it was acclaimed with unstinted praise, both at home and abroad, and caused the author to be classed by Gálvez de Montalvo and by Pedro de Padilla among the most famous poets of Castile. It brought him friends; it gave him enemies; but it was powerless to advance his worldly fortune--the money derived from the sale of the various editions of the book found their way into other pockets.

Of the _Galatea_, Cervantes has left us his own critical estimate in Chapter iv., Part I., of _Don Quixote_. The curate and the barber are overhauling the Don’s library--“those unconscionable books of disventures,” the tales of chivalry over which he would pore for eight-and-forty hours together--and of the hundred large volumes, and a good number of small ones, only some half-dozen escape the bonfire that has been built of them in the back yard. The _Galatea_ was one of the exempt. “That Cervantes has been my intimate acquaintance these many years,” cried the curate, “and I know he has been more conversant with misfortunes than with poetry. His book, indeed, has I don’t know what, that looks like a good design; he aims at something, but concludes nothing; therefore, we must stay for the second part, which he has promised us; perhaps he may make us amends, and obtain a full pardon, which is denied him for the present....”

The _Galatea_, the second part of which was never written, is not lost to us, though it is little read; but of the rest of the survivors of the curate’s conflagration, and which Cervantes praises through the lips of his character--_Amadis de Gaul_, _Palmerin of England_, _Ten Books of the Fortunes of Love_, by Anthony de Lofraco; _The Shepherd of Filida_, together with the _Araucana_, of Don Alonso de Ercilla; the _Austirada_, of Jean Ruffo, a magistrate of Cordova; and the _Monserrato_, of Christopher de Virves, a Valentian poet--they are now only known because they are mentioned in _Don Quixote_. Yet of the last three works Cervantes makes the curate declare: “These are the best heroic poems we have in Spanish, and may vie with the most celebrated in Italy. Reserve them as the most valuable performances which Spain has to boast of in poetry.”

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.