Part 5

“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

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

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

painting. The fine eyes are set beneath a broad forehead, the nose is prominent and well defined, while the weakness in the chin and jaw are not uncharacteristic of the general character of Cervantes. These features are, moreover, in keeping with the description which the author has given us of himself in the prologue of _Novelas Exemplares_, already referred to, and which, of course, was followed by William Kent. Thus he presents himself to his readers: “He, whom you see here, of aquiline feature, with chestnut hair, a smooth, unruffled forehead, with sparkling eyes, and a nose arched though well proportioned; a beard of silver, which, not twenty years since, was of gold; great moustaches, a small mouth, the teeth of no account, for he has but six of them, and they in bad condition and worse arranged, for they do not hold correspondence one with another; the body between two extremes, neither great nor little; the complexion bright, rather white than brown, somewhat heavy in the shoulders. This, I say, is the aspect of the author of _Don Quixote of La Mancha_.” With this detailed description we must be content; and if it is not a portrait, it is sufficient to afford us material for recreating a picture of Cervantes according to our individual tastes.

It is generally agreed that the novels which Cervantes published in 1613, under the title of _Novelas Exemplares_--because “there is not one of them from which some profitable example cannot be drawn”--were written many years before, but there seems equally as good reason for supposing that they were the results of his last seven years residence in Madrid. In variety of subject and manner, in the extraordinary knowledge of life that they reveal, in the mature art with which they are told, they exhibit the hand of the experienced craftsman, and warrant the eulogy of the author, who wrote of them that “had they not been turned out of the workshop of his wit, he might presume to place them by the side of the best ever designed.” After _Don Quixote_, they are reckoned in Spain amongst the best stories of their kind in the language; but they have achieved little popularity out of the Peninsula. Yet they have not been without their fervent admirers in this country, and amongst them Sir Walter Scott must be acknowledged the chief, since Lockhart declares that it was these stories of Cervantes that inspired the author of the Waverley novels to his first essay in fiction.

In the following year, 1614, Cervantes published two volumes of his writings, _Viaja del Parnaso_ and a collection of plays. The poem, though based on an ingenious idea, and containing some of the best verse which the poet has given us, justifies the contemporary verdict upon his compositions, which was, as Cervantes himself tells us, that “of his prose much was to be expected, but of his verse nothing.” The _Journey Around Parnassus_ is written in imitation of a poem, now forgotten, by the Italian author, Cesare Caporali, and it serves as a record of the names of a string of Spanish minor poets whom Cervantes praises with more credit to his heart than his discrimination. His own generation allowed the book to fall still-born from the press, and its one interest to modern Cervantists lies in the autobiographical details which are to be found in the prose prefix. We read here that he is residing in the _Calle de las Huertas_, in a house “over against the mansion where the Prince of Morocco used to live;” we are introduced to the beruffled, exquisite, and would-be poet (by the correction of whose verses Cervantes doubtless derived part of his slender income); we learn that his niece paid a _real_ for postage on a letter which contained nothing more valuable than an anonymous, defamatory sonnet upon the author of _Don Quixote_; and, finally, we are told that the writer has in hand a dozen comedies and farces in equal proportions, which, having been rejected of theatre-managers, he proposes to present to the world in book form.

The volume of eight comedies and eight farces here referred to was published in the same year. A bookseller, being found, willing to take the risks of publishing them, Cervantes tells us in his preface that he “made the venture and sold them to the bookseller, who sent them to the Press. He paid me a reasonable sum for them; I took the money meekly, without making account of the quirks and quibbles of the players. I would they were the best in the world, or, at least, of fair worth.” But the pieces fared no better at the hands of the public than they had with the theatre-managers. Nor did they deserve a better fate, being unworthy of the author of _Don Quixote_, or even of the _Numancia_ of his earlier days. Cervantes, rendered desperate by want, has in these pages deviated from the principles that he had laid down for his own guidance, and his object would appear to be to woo the public by pandering to their debased taste. But as he had before been compelled to give place, as a playwright, to men who possessed a greater share of dramatic sense and fitness, so now he was competing vainly with men, less gifted than himself, who had more accurately gauged the public taste, and were more dexterous in catering for it. In letters, more often than in any other branch of the arts, the man of genius who writes down to his public falls short of success. It is the second-rate writers who undertake seriously the task which the master attempts, with his tongue in his cheek and contempt for his output in his heart, who achieve their object. So Cervantes failed again as a playwright, and he failed so conspicuously that Blas de Nasarre, who republished these poor farces and more inferior comedies in 1749, claimed that the author had written them in ridicule of Lope de Vega, just as he had written _Don Quixote_ in ridicule of the books of chivalry; while his always appreciative biographer, H. E. Watts, concludes that Cervantes “intended them as specimens of the drama which was in vogue in his day, rather than as

models of that true art of which we know he had grasped the principles.”

Cervantes had, we must suppose, been wrenched from his artistic principles and ideals by the pinch of poverty; yet at this late period of his life, his fame as an author was spread not only throughout Spain, but in France, Italy, Germany, and Flanders. When Francisco Marquez Torres, Chaplain to the Archbishop of Toledo, was interrogated by some members of the French Embassy in Madrid, as to the age, profession, quality, and fortune of the celebrated author of _Don Quixote_, Señor Torres found himself “compelled to say that he was an old man, a soldier, a gentleman, and poor.” The chaplain, who tells this story in the approbation prefixed to the Second Part of _Don Quixote_, continues: “To which one of them responded in these precise words: ‘But does not Spain keep such a man rich, and supported out of the public Treasury?’ Another of these gentlemen broke in with this idea, saying, with much acuteness, ‘If it is necessity compels him to write, may God send he may never have abundance; so that, poor himself, he may make the whole world rich.’”

Cervantes, in his long and varied career, had suffered much from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but in the last months of his life he was to endure the most cruel and malignant hurt that the envy and enmity of man could inflict on an author. In the summer of 1614, just two years before his death, when Cervantes was leisurely completing the second part of the work, which was to make his name immortal, there appeared at Tarragoza a work entitled, “_The Second Part of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, containing his Third Sally_.” This work, vulgar, lewd and malicious, purposed to be the continuation and the end of the story which Cervantes had published ten years before. The name of the author was given as Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda, of Tordesillas; the book was dedicated to the “Alcade, Regidors, and Hidalgos of the noble city of Argamasilla,” &c.; the licensing for printing was in the handwriting of Doctor Francisco de Torne, of Liori, Vicar-General to the Archbishop of Tarragona, and the publication was justified by the contention of one Dr. Rafael Orthoneda, who declared that it “ought to be printed, because it seemed to him to contain nothing immodest or forbidden.”

If this publication had revealed no more than a mean and avaricious desire to profit by the popularity of the First Part of _Don Quixote_, and to defraud Cervantes by forestalling him in the demand which was in waiting for the completion of the work; if the author had imitated the style and spirit of the great original with the sole thought of skimming Cervantes’ market--even so the outrage would have been almost unparalleled at that period in the history of letters. But the conspiracy, for conspiracy it was beyond doubt, was deeper, more subtle and diabolical