Part 6
in its inspiration and execution. Avellaneda, whoever the man was who clothed his identity beneath this sobriquet, was a person of some literary talent, but his malice outstripped his wit, and his humour is choked with lewdness. The aim and purpose of the book is deliberately divulged in the prologue, which is nothing less than a savage revilement of Cervantes. His literary defects are assailed with ungovernable fury; his age, his poverty, even the wounds, of which he was so proud, are hurled in his teeth. He is described as having “more tongue than hands;” his impediment in his speech is made matter for mockery; his state is compared with the ruined castle of San Cervantes; and his person, temperament, and condition are summarised in a venemous sentence, in which he is called “a cripple, a soldier old in years, though youthful in spirit; envious, discontented, a back-biter, a malefactor, or, at least, a jail-bird.” It is curious and characteristic of the tone of this attack that Cervantes, the gallant soldier who had won his wounds in the service of his country, but who had not allowed his buoyant spirit or kindliness of heart to be conquered by hardship, penury, and suffering, should be villified for the very things for which the world now holds him in love and esteem. Finally, having attempted to belittle his achievements, and blast his character, his assailant acknowledges that his book is a deliberate attempt to deprive Cervantes of the profit expected from his labours.
In the false _Don Quixote_ thus thrust upon the public the whole design of the original is studied only for the purpose of destroying it; it is written with the set and determined idea of making the name of the Knight of La Mancha stink in the nostrils of the admirers of Cervantes. Here the Don is represented as a common lunatic, who disappears from the story into an asylum for the insane. Sancho Panza is transformed into a gluttonous, vulgar, ignoramus. Dorothea, whose grace and daintiness add fragrance and wit to the original story, becomes a mere wanton. The whole story reeks of obscenity, vulgarity, and dullness, yet an eminent cleric licensed it; Le Sage professed to see in it merits equal to the true history; and the Spanish Academy has preserved the work as being worthy a place in the national collection of classics. Not a detail is wanting to detract from the enormity of the outrage, to give Cervantes the unenviable distinction of being the most basely treated man among the many unfortunates in literature; for surely, never before or since, was an author so villainously used.
Nearly three centuries have elapsed since Cervantes laid aside his pen and rested from the indignities which his generation piled upon him, but the identity of the author of the crowning indignity of his career is still to be revealed. Cervantes himself must have had a shrewd suspicion of the author of this conspiracy, but he either refrained from publishing his name, or felt too insecure in his facts, to be
able to prove the charge; or, as his first biographer asserts, his assailant was so powerful as to defy accusation. The secret was kept, at the time, with a success that to us seems incomprehensible, and has created controversy and speculation which has not decreased with years. But it would appear that until the ploughshare of accident shall turn up from the fallow earth of the literary past, or until the jealous guard which is posted over the letters in the _Biblioteca Nacional_ shall be relaxed, speculation and conjecture are vain. Luis de Aliaga, the King’s Confessor, Alarcon the Dramatist, Bartolomé de Argénsola, Cervantes’ one-time friend; the monk Perez, who wrote _La Picara Justina_; and the great Lope de Vega himself have all been laid under the suspicion of being the writer of the false _Don Quixote_. The weight of circumstantial evidence bears hardest upon Vega, whose private letters have disclosed his ill-will and envy towards Cervantes; whose life and character--despite the arguments urged by his apologists--convict him, at least, of being capable of committing so foul a deed; and whose method of waging literary warfare was quite in the manner of the false Prologue. A man of his arrogant disposition would resent bitterly the criticism which Cervantes applied to his plans in the First Part of his _magnum opus_, and we can believe of him that he would stop at nothing to be revenged upon his critic. A jealous, unscrupulous, intolerant man, confident of the protection of friends in high places; a libertine who acted as procurer for the Duke of Sessa; an officer of the Holy Inquisition; and the only real rival to Cervantes in the arena of letters--if Lope de Vega did not himself pen the false _Don Quixote_, he will go down to posterity as the suspected inspirer of the basest literary atrocity that has ever been perpetrated.
On this point, as on most details affecting Cervantes, Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly is emphatic in his conclusion, and he accepts the decision by Máinez, that if the hand is the hand of Avellaneda, the voice is the voice of Lope de Vega. He finds in the character of the celebrated dramatist the temperamental fitness for such a task, and he locates the incentive in his unsupportable jealousy. “Till _Don Quixote_ appeared no rival had ever dared to come within the shadow of his throne, and its lasting success was torment to his soul. It was too plain that the world had gone stark mad, captivated by the book of the poverty-stricken, maimed wanderer who, after a life of squalid failure, had had the assurance to produce a masterpiece. It was no longer possible to kill _Don Quixote_ by the cheap sneer that no one was such an ass as to praise it. Lope had played that card, and no longer cherished any such delusion.... But it was still possible to injure; still possible to defame; still possible to rob the old man of a few doubloons; still possible to deride him, to wound his pride, to forestall his market by writing a continuation of the accursed volume which had dared to thrust itself
between Lope and the public;” and so, though other biographers may canvass every contemporary writer and weigh the relative qualifications and provocations of envious poets and resentful prelates, Mr. Kelly refuses to look beyond Lope de Vega for the author of the false Second Part of _Don Quixote_.
Germond de Lavigne, with a sophistry, inspired, we may suppose, by admiration of Vega, declared that we owe a debt to Avellaneda, seeing that but for him _Don Quixote_ would have remained a mere _torso_, instead of a complete work. Such a piece of special pleading is, of course, fallacious, since Cervantes had pledged himself to produce a second part, and the book must have been nearing completion, in 1614, when Avellaneda’s travesty was published. It is evident that he had progressed as far as the nineteenth chapter, and was within ten chapters of the end, when the Tarragonese bastard was put into circulation, and Cervantes, changing his published plan of procedure, turns Don Quixote from his purpose of entering the lists at Zaragoza and hurries him off to Barcelona. With this counterfeit upon the market Cervantes could no longer pursue the leisurely tenor of his way, and the injury he had received spurred him to new flights of pungent humour. But although our author in this Second Part of _Don Quixote_ deals with his enemy with dignified restraint, and introduces him in person to drub him with the jester’s bladder, rather than becudgel him with his own club, we descry in the dedication of his last book of comedies (1615) how keenly he felt the smart.
Avellaneda had charged him with disparaging the innumerable “stupendous comedies” of Lope de Vega, and of persecuting the Inquisition. Cervantes straightly denies both these imputations, declaring that he “adores Vega’s genius, and admires his works continuous and virtuous,” and protests that he is not likely to persecute any ecclesiastic--above all, if he is a familiar of the Holy Office to boot. “But,” he writes in this dedication to the Conde de Lemos, “that which I cannot help feeling is that he charges me with being old and maimed, as though it had been in my power to stop time from passing over me, or as though my deformity had been produced in some tavern, and not on the grandest occasion which ages past and present have seen, or those to come can hope to see. If my wounds do not shine in the eyes of him who looks on them, they are at least honoured in the estimation of those who know where they were acquired; for the soldier looks better dead in battle than alive in flight. And so much I am of this opinion that if now I could devise and bring about the impossible, I would rather be present again in that wonderful action than now be whole of my wounds, without having taken part therein.”
With this manly and characteristic protest we may, I think, close the volume of this scandal, and press forward to the near close of Cervantes’ career.
In this same dedication there is the intimation that _Don Quixote_ is “waiting in the Second Part, booted and spurred, to do homage” to the Conde de Lemos, and before the end of the year (1615) the completion of the great work was published. The book was printed by Juan de la Cuesta, who had printed the First Part, and Francisco de Robles was again associated with Cervantes as publisher. The public received the new volume with the same enthusiasm that they had extended to its predecessor, and although posthumous criticism has in some instances refused to regard it as equal in merit to the first instalment--Charles Lamb went out of his way to refer to it as “that unfortunate Second Part”--the general reading public of successive generations have agreed in regarding it as the most diverting half of the novel. Cervantes himself has declared, through the mouth of the scholar, Samson Carrasco, that second parts are never good, but this rule found a striking exception in the case of his own work. With increasing years the author betrayed no sign of flagging vivacity; experience had lent him a surer hand in the development of character; and while the Knight of La Mancha’s adventures take on a less fantastic guise, and his reflections increase in wisdom, the wit of Sancho Panza broadens and ripens, and the humanity of the immortal comrades acquires a deeper note. Lamb wrote of “that unworthy Duke,” and he condemned the Duchess as “most comtemptible.” Many readers of Cervantes must at times have rebelled against the ingenuity with which the Don’s ducal entertainers conspired to make sport of their guest, and have deplored the means they employed in accomplishing their purpose. But if Cervantes had not had resource to these exalted conspirators we should have lost the passages between Sancho and the Duchess, the story of the squire’s government, and the course prescribed for the disenchantment of Dulcinea del Tobosco--surely among the most richly humorous chapters in the whole story!--and, finally, the death-bed scene, with the old knight-errant, disillusioned, but resigned, dictating his will with his weeping friends around him, and his faithful squire beseeching him “not to die this time, but even take my counsel, and live on many years,” since “the maddest thing ever a man can do is to die!”
Yet in the face of facts there are critics who would argue that the Second Part was inferior to the First, both as a work of art and as a commercial venture. It is certainly incorrect to say, as one writer does, that “when the second part of _Don Quixote_ came before the world it was universally felt that in nearly every respect it betrayed a great falling off.” Nor can the following criticism, taken from the same source, be accepted: “The fire of imagination, which had sustained him throughout the earlier cycle of adventures, now began to burn low; there was less wit in the speeches, less vivacity in the conversation, less humour and pathos in the situations and incidents. He perceived that he had a great
rival to contend with, and that rival was himself. He had, properly speaking, exhausted his originality in the first part, together with his store of situations, his brilliancy of wit, his freshness of imagery, his peculiar power of delineating singular characters, and placing them in singular circumstances. There is wit in the second part, but it is pale; comedy, but it is forced; vivacity, but it is artificial. You discover nearly everywhere comparative poverty of invention, but a perpetual tendency to imitate himself.”
What shall be said of _Don Quixote_ that has not been said already? or why should we marvel because different men have read it differently? Is it the joyfullest of books, as Carlyle calls it, or do we find it, with Sismondi and De Amicis, the most melancholy of histories? Humour it has, the ripest and rarest that has ever been translated into our language, and pathos that touches the depths of the human emotion. Sir Walter Scott speaks of Cervantes’ humour as “the very poetry of the comic, founded on a tender sympathy with all forms of existence, though displaying itself in sportive reflection, and issuing, not in superficial laughter, but in still smiles, the source of which lies far deeper”; yet others have declared that it lacks “a thread of pathos.” Edward Fitzgerald praised it as “the most delightful of books.” Dr. Johnson declared it to be one of the three books written by a man which the reader wishes to be longer. From Swift to Heine, from Charles Lamb to Sainte-Beuve, from Johnson to Schlegel, the literary giants of all ages and all nationalities have joined in praise of _Don Quixote_.
In England and France and Germany it is still regarded as a romance, unapproachable in its _genre_; a work of true genius, supreme, imperishable. But in Spain it has passed from romance, in the national mind, into the realms of reality. In La Mancha the people point to the windmills as proof of the Don’s existence; in Argamasilla they show you the house in which the Knight lived, and draw attention to the ruins of a large, round window, out of which the curate and the barber consigned Don Quixote’s library to the flames. Here is the sluggish Guadiana, in which Sancho Panza’s daughter washed the family linen, and the parish church which guards the veritable portrait of Rodrigo Pacheco, _alias_ Alonzo Quixano, known to fame as Don Quixote de la Mancha, and variously styled the Knight of the Lions and the Knight of the Rueful Countenance. These good, simple Manchegans, who are too wise to mistake _Don Quixote_ for clumsy satire, and recognise the nobility, and wisdom, and virtue of the gallant, fantastic knight-errant, who is “nobly wild--not mad,” have not failed to detect the moral for the age, indeed for all ages, which Mr. Austin Dobson has used as the kernel of his sonnet on the Don:
“Alas! poor Knight! Alas! poor soul possest! Yet would to-day, when courtesy grows chill And life’s fine loyalties are turned to jest, Some fire of thine might burn within us still! Ah, would but one might lay his lance in rest, And charge in earnest--were it but a mill!”
Cervantes survived the publication of _Don Quixote_ some six months--long enough to see the false Second Part routed and extinguished by his own all-conquering creation. Inspired to renewed activity by the chorus of praise which greeted his latest production, we find him, in his 69th year, arranging his plans for the output of three more works--_The Weeks of the Garden_, the second part of the _Galatea_, and the _Travels of Persiles and Sigismunda_, which latter was to be “either the worst or the best of books of entertainment in our language.” The sequel to the _Galatea_ and the projected _Weeks of the Garden_ were probably never commenced, although he refers to them both again in the prologue to _Persiles_, which was written on his death-bed, and published by his widow in 1617.
Although _Persiles and Sigismunda_ has been extravagantly praised by Valdivielso--“Of the many books written by Cervantes,” he says, “none is more ingenious, more cultured, or more entertaining”--and although it has gone into more editions than any of the minor works of its author, this return to the monstrous artificial style which he had been the means of destroying, is a paradoxical and incomprehensible variant of his genius. In the last chapter of _Don Quixote_ he had caused the Knight to aver: “I now declare myself an enemy to Amadis de Gaul, and his whole generation; all stories of knight-errantry I detest.” Yet within a few months of writing this passage he was engaged in completing a conglomeration of adventures, experienced by a pair of impossible lovers, under every kind of impossible condition. The Spanish critics admire the book for the beauty and correctness of the language, and the grace and charm of its style, but, as a work of creative art, it lacks invention and originality; and, as a piece of fiction--a “pastime for the melancholy and mopish soul”--it is tedious and ineffective.
But because it carries with it the biographically-conceived dedication to the Conde de Lemos, we are grateful to Cervantes for his last romance. In it we read of the return journey from the famous town of Esquívias--“famous for a thousand things, one for its illustrious families, and another for its most illustrious wines”--on which Cervantes tells us he was overtaken by the grey student on the little she-ass. His chance companion having addressed him as “the all famous, the merry writer, and, indeed, the joy of the muses,” they resumed their journey, in the course of which the infirmity of the merry writer was touched upon. “At which,” says Cervantes, “the good student checked my mirth in a moment: ‘This malady is the dropsy, which not all the water of ocean, let it be ever so sweet drinking, can cure. Let your worship, Señor Cervantes, set bounds to your drink, not forgetting to eat, for so without other medicine you will do well.’ ‘That many have told me,’ answered I, ‘but I can no more give up drinking for pleasure than if I had been born for nothing else. My life is slipping away, and, by the diary my
pulse is keeping, which at the latest will end its reckoning this coming Sunday, I have to close my life’s account. Your worship has come to know me in a rude moment, since there is no time for me to show my gratitude for the goodwill you have shown me.’”
In a letter to his “very illustrious lord,” the Archbishop of Toledo, dated 26th March, 1616, Cervantes wrote: “If for the malady which affects me there could be any relief, the repeated marks of favour and protection which your illustrious person bestows on me would be sufficient to relieve me: but, indeed, it increases so greatly that I think it will make an end of me, although not of my gratitude.” In his valedictory dedication to the Conde de Lemos he speaks of himself as “with one foot in the stirrup, waiting the call of death.” “Yesterday,” he continues, “they gave me extreme unction, and to-day I am writing. The time is short, my agonies increase; my hopes diminish.” And then comes his brave, blithesome, parting message: “Good-bye, humours; good-bye, pleasant fancies; good-bye, merry friends; for I perceive I am dying, in the wish to see you happy in the other life.”
This was his last greeting to his patron, and to the world that had learned to love him so well. His dedication is dated 19th April, and on 23rd April, 1616--nominally on the same day that Shakespeare died--the illustrious Spaniard heard the summons of Death, and passed into the great beyond. He was buried as a member of the Franciscan Order in the graveyard of the Convent in the Calle del Humilladero, to which his daughter Isabel shortly afterwards retired. No stone marked the place where the body of Cervantes was laid, but we know that his widow, his daughters, and the other members of his family were laid to rest in the same hallowed ground, and that in 1635, when the Trinitarian sisters removed themselves to the Calle de Cantaranas, the remains of the departed members of their Order were collected into a common heap and carried by the sisterhood to their new Convent. The manuscripts, the pictures, even the bones of the author of _Don Quixote_ are thus lost to the knowledge of the world. But the man lives again to-day in the commendations of his generals, in the testimony of his brothers-in-arms, in the evidence of his devoted fellow-captives in Algeria, and in his own modest biographical memoranda. We recognise him in the brilliant description of him that has been penned by the Spanish biographer, Aribau, as the man who “passed through the world as a stranger whose language was not understood,” announcing “the dawn of a civilisation which broke long afterwards.”
But even as Cervantes has given us the best picture of himself, he has given us also the best epithet that has ever been penned concerning him. He was thinking not of himself, but of Chrysostom, when he uttered the eulogy in which we may apostrophise the body of Cervantes: “This body ...
was one enlivened by a soul which Heaven had enriched with the greatest part of its most valuable graces ... who was unrivalled in wit, matchless in courteousness, a phœnix in friendship ... prudent and grave without pride, modest without affectation, pleasant and complaisant without meanness; in a word, the first in everything good, though second to none in misfortune.”
THE PROVERBS OF CERVANTES.
It has been declared, without provoking contradiction, that Spanish proverbs are undoubtedly wiser and wittier, as well as more numerous than those of any other language. At least a dozen collections of these tabloids of wisdom have been published in Spain; the largest, which was compiled by Juan de Yriarte, containing no fewer than 24,000 proverbs. At least half-a-dozen volumes were in existence in the time of Cervantes; and from these sources it may be presumed he went for much of the sage and pointed witticisms with which Sancho Panza garnishes his conversation. Though it was not the purpose of the author of _Don Quixote_ to select the most characteristic and representative specimens in the language, he has brought together in his book some 300 examples of the _refranes_ which were then in current use; and from those which he considered worthy of quotation I have made the following selection:
“The devil lurks behind the cross.”--I. 6; II. 33, 47.
“What is good is never too abundant.”--I. 6.
“Many go for wool, and come back shorn.”--I. 7; II. 14, 43, 67.
“One swallow does not make a summer.”--I. 13.
“There is no recollection which time does not obliterate, nor grief which death does not destroy.”--I. 15.
“There is nothing certain in this life.”--I. 15.
“What hath been, hath been.”--I. 20.
“All will come out in the washing.”--I. 20, 22; II. 36.
“Do not ask as a favour what you can obtain by force.”--I. 21.
“When one door is shut, another is opened.”--I. 21.
“Let him be wretched who thinks himself so.”--I. 21.
“No discourse that is long can be pleasing.”--I. 21.
“Man goes as God is pleased.”--I. 22.
He who sings frightens away his ills.”--I. 22.
“‘No’ contains the same number of letters as ‘Ay.’”--I. 22.