Part 4

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.