among the laity. The great schism of England had been fully completed
under Elizabeth. The devout heart of Spain was bursting under this
wrong, and they could think of no way to avenge it. They would fain have
roasted the whole heretical island, but the memory of the Armada was
fresh in men's minds, and the great Philip was dead. There were not
enough heretics in Spain to make it worth while to waste time in hunting
them. Philip could say as Narvaez, on his death-bed, said to his
confessor who urged him to forgive his enemies, "Bless your heart, I
have none. I have killed them all." To ease their pious hearts, they
formed confraternities all over Spain, for the worship of the Host. They
called themselves "Unworthy Slaves of the Most Holy Sacrament." These
grew at once very popular in all classes. Artisans rushed in, and wasted
half their working days in processions and meetings. The severe Suarez
de Figueroa speaks savagely of the crowd of Narcissuses and petits
maitres (a word which is delicious in its Spanish dress of petimetres)
who entered the congregations simply to flutter about the processions in
brave raiment, to be admired of the multitude. But there were other more
serious members,--the politicians who joined to stand well with the
bigot court, and the devout believers who found comfort and edification
in worship. Of this latter class was Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, who
joined the brotherhood in the street of the Olivar in 1609. He was now
sixty-two years old, and somewhat infirm,--a time, as he said, when a
man's salvation is no joke. From this period to the day of his death he
seemed to be laboring, after the fashion of the age, to fortify his
standing in the other world. He adopted the habit of the Franciscans in
Alcala in 1613, and formally professed in the Third Order in 1616, three
weeks before his death.
There are those who find the mirth and fun of his later works so
inconsistent with these ascetic professions, that they have been led to
believe Cervantes a bit of a hypocrite. But we cannot agree with such.
Literature was at that time a diversion of the great, and the chief aim
of the writer was to amuse. The best opinion of scholars now is that
Rabelais, whose genius illustrated the preceding century, was a man of
serious and severe life, whose gaulish crudeness of style and brilliant
wit have been the cause of all the fables that distort his personal
history.
No one can read attentively even the Quixote without seeing how powerful
an influence was exerted by his religion even upon the noble and kindly
soul of Cervantes. He was a blind bigot and a devoted royalist, like all
the rest. The mean neglect of the Court never caused his stanch loyalty
to swerve. The expulsion of the Moors, the crowning crime and madness of
the reign of Philip III., found in him a hearty advocate and defender.
_Non facit monachum cucullus,--_it was not his hood and girdle that made
him a monk; he was thoroughly saturated with their spirit before he put
them on. But he was the noblest courtier and the kindliest bigot that
ever flattered or persecuted.
In 1610, the Count of Lemos, who had in his grand and distant way
patronized the poet, was appointed Viceroy of Naples, and took with him
to his kingdom a brilliant following of Spanish wits and scholars. He
refused the petition of the greatest of them all, however, and to soften
the blow gave him a small pension, which he continued during the rest of
Cervantes's life. It was a mere pittance, a bone thrown to an old hound,
but he took it and gnawed it with a gratitude more generous than the
gift. From this time forth all his works were dedicated to the Lord of
Lemos, and they form a garland more brilliant and enduring than the
crown of the Spains. Only kind words to disguised fairies have ever been
so munificently repaid, as this young noble's pension to the old genius.
It certainly eased somewhat his declining years. Relieving him from the
necessity of earning his daily crust, it gave him leisure to complete
and bring out in rapid succession the works which have made him
immortal. He had published the first part of Don Quixote in the midst of
his hungry poverty at Valladolid in 1605. He was then fifty-eight, and
all his works that survive are posterior to that date. He built his
monument from the ground up, in his old age. The Persiles and
Sigis-munda, the Exemplary Novels, and that most masterly and perfect
work, the Second Part of Quixote, were written by the flickering glimmer
of a life burnt out.
It would be incorrect to infer that the scanty dole of his patron
sustained him in comfort. Nothing more clearly proves his straitened
circumstances than his frequent change of lodgings. Old men do not move
for the love of variety. We have traced him through six streets in the
last four years of his life. But a touching fact is that they are all in
the same quarter. It is understood that his natural daughter and only
child, Isabel de Saavedra, entered the Convent of the Trinitarian nuns
in the street of Cantarranas--Singing Frogs--at some date unknown. All
the shifting and changing which Cervantes made in these embarrassed
years are within a small half-circle, whose centre is his grave and the
cell of his child. He fluttered about that little convent like a gaunt
old eagle about the cage that guards his callow young.
Like Albert Duerer, like Raphael and Van Dyck, he painted his own
portrait at this time with a force and vigor of touch which leaves
little to the imagination. As few people ever read the Exemplary
Novels,--more is the pity,--I will translate this passage from the
Prologue:--
"He whom you see there with the aquiline face, chestnut hair, a smooth
and open brow, merry eyes, a nose curved but well proportioned, a beard
of silver which twenty years ago was of gold, long mustaches, a small
mouth, not too full of teeth, seeing he has but six, and these in bad
condition, a form of middle height, a lively color, rather fair than
brown, somewhat round-shouldered and not too light on his feet; this is
the face of the author of Galatea and of Don Quixote de la Mancha, of
him who made the Voyage to Parnassus, and other works which are straying
about without the name of the owner: he is commonly called Miguel de
Cervantes Saavedra."
There were, after all, compensations in this evening of life. As long as
his dropsy would let him, he climbed the hilly street of the Olivar to
say his prayers in the little oratory. He passed many a cheerful hour of
gossip with Mother Francisca Romero, the independent superior of the
Trinitarian Convent, until the time when the Supreme Council, jealous of
the freedom of the good lady's life, walled up the door which led from
her house to her convent and cut her off from her nuns. He sometimes
dropped into the studios of Carducho and Caxes, and one of them made a
sketch of him one fortunate day. He was friends with many of the
easy-going Bohemians who swarmed in the quarter,--Cristobal de Mesa,
Quevedo, and Mendoza, whose writings, Don Miguel says, are distinguished
by the absence of all that would bring a "blush to the cheek of a young
person,"--
"Por graves, puros, castos y excelentes."
In the same street where Cervantes lived and died, the great Lope de
Vega passed his edifying old age. This phenomenon of incredible
fecundity is one of the mysteries of that time. Few men of letters have
ever won so marvellous a success in their own lives, few have been so
little read after death. The inscription on Lope's house records that he
is the author of two thousand comedies and twenty-one million of verses.
Making all possible deductions for Spanish exaggeration, it must still
be admitted that his activity and fertility of genius were prodigious.
In those days a play was rarely acted more than two or three times, and
he wrote nearly all that were produced in Spain. He had driven all
competitors from the scene. Cervantes, when he published his collection
of plays, admitted the impossibility of getting a hearing in the theatre
while this "monster of nature" existed. There was a courteous
acquaintance between the two great poets. They sometimes wrote sonnets
to each other, and often met in the same oratories. But a grand seigneur
like Frey Lope could not afford to be intimate with a shabby genius like
brother Miguel. In his inmost heart he thought Don Quixote rather low,
and wondered what people could see in it. Cervantes, recognizing the
great gifts of De Vega, and, generously giving him his full meed of
praise, saw with clearer insight than any man of his time that this
deluge of prodigal and facile genius would desolate rather than fructify
the drama of Spain. What a contrast in character and destiny between our
dilapidated poet and his brilliant neighbor across the way! The one
rich, magnificent, the poet of princes and a prince among poets, the
"Phoenix of Spanish Genius," in whose ashes there is no flame of
resurrection; the other, hounded through life by unmerciful disaster,
and using the brief respite of age to achieve an enduring renown; the
one, with his twenty millions of verses, has a great name in the history
of literature; but the other, with his volume you can carry in your
pocket, has caused the world to call the Castilian tongue the language
of Cervantes. We will not decide which lot is the more enviable. But it
seems a poet must choose. We have the high authority of Sancho for
saying,--
"Para dar y tener
Seso ha menester."
He is a bright boy who can eat his cake and have it.
In some incidents of the closing scenes of these memorable lives there
is a curious parallelism. Lope de Vega and Cervantes lived and died in
the same street, now called the Calle de Cervantes, and were buried in
the same convent of the street now called Calle de Lope de Vega. In this
convent each had placed a beloved daughter, the fruit of an early and
unlawful passion. Isabel de Saavedra, the child of sin and poverty, was
so ignorant she could not sign her name; while Lope's daughter, the
lovely and gifted Marcela de Carpio, was rich in the genius of her
father and the beauty of her mother, the high-born Maria de Lujan.
Cervantes's child glided from obscurity to oblivion no one knew when,
and the name she assumed with her spiritual vows is lost to tradition.
But the mystic espousals of the sister Marcela de San Felix to the
eldest son of God--the audacious phrase is of the father and priest Frey
Lope--were celebrated with princely pomp and luxury; grandees of Spain
were her sponsors; the streets were invaded with carriages from the
palace, the verses of the dramatist were sung in the service by the
Court tenor Florian, called the "Canary of Heaven;" and the event
celebrated in endless rhymes by the genteel poets of the period.
Rarely has a lovelier sacrifice been offered on the altar of
superstition. The father, who had been married twice before he entered
the priesthood, and who had seen the folly of errant loves without
number, twitters in the most innocent way about the beauty and the charm
of his child, without one thought of the crime of quenching in the gloom
of the cloister the light of that rich young life. After the lapse of
more than two centuries we know better than he what the world lost by
that lifelong imprisonment. The Marquis of Mo-lins, director of the
Spanish Academy, was shown by the ladies of the convent in this year of
1870 a volume of manuscript poems from the hand of Sor Marcela, which
prove her to have been one of the most vigorous and original poets of
the time. They are chiefly mystical and ecstatic, and full of the
refined and spiritual voluptuousness of a devout young heart whose
pulsations had never learned to beat for earthly objects. M. de Molins
is preparing a volume of these manuscripts; but I am glad to present one
of the seguidillas here, as an illustration of the tender and ardent
fantasies of virginal passion this Christian Sappho embroidered upon the
theme of her wasted prayers:--
Let them say to my Lover
That here I lie!
The thing of his pleasure,
His slave am I.
Say that I seek him
Only for love,
And welcome are tortures
My passion to prove.
Love giving gifts
Is suspicious and cold;
I have _all,_ my Beloved,
When thee I hold.
Hope and devotion
The good may gain,
I am but worthy
Of passion and pain.
So noble a Lord
None serves in vain,--
For the pay of my love
Is my love's sweet pain.
I love thee, to love thee,
No more I desire,
By faith is nourished
My love's strong fire.
I kiss thy hands
When I feel their blows,
In the place of caresses
Thou givest me woes.
But in thy chastising
Is joy and peace,
O Master and Love,
Let thy blows not cease!
Thy beauty, Beloved,
With scorn is rife!
But I know that thou lovest me,
Better than life.
And because thou lovest me,
Lover of mine,
Death can but make me
Utterly thine!
I die with longing
Thy face to see;
Ah! sweet is the anguish
Of death to me!
This is a long digression, but it will be forgiven by those who feel how
much of beautiful and pathetic there is in the memory of this mute
nightingale dying with her passionate music all unheard in the silence
and shadows. It is to me the most purely poetic association that clings
about the grave of Cervantes.
This vein of mysticism in religion has been made popular by the recent
canonization of Saint Theresa, the ecstatic nun of Avila. In the
ceremonies that celebrated this event there were three prizes awarded
for odes to the new saint. Lope de Vega was chairman of the committee of
award, and Cervantes was one of the competitors. The prizes it must be
admitted were very tempting: first, a silver pitcher; second, eight
yards of camlet; and third, a pair of silk stockings. We hope
Cervantes's poem was not the best. We would rather see him carry home
the stuff for a new cloak and pourpoint, or even those very attractive
silk stockings for his shrunk shank, than that silver pitcher which he
was too Castilian ever to turn to any sensible use. The poems are
published in a compendium of the time, without indicating the successful
ones; and that of Cervantes contained these lines, which would seem
hazardous in this colder age, but which then were greatly admired:--
"Breaking all bolts and bars,
Comes the Divine One, sailing from the stars,
Full in thy sight to dwell:
And those who seek him, shortening the road,
Come to thy blest abode,
And find him in thy heart or in thy cell."
The anti-climax is the poet's, and not mine.
He knew he was nearing his end, but worked desperately to retrieve the
lost years of his youth, and leave the world some testimony of his
powers. He was able to finish and publish the Second Part of Quixote,
and to give the last touches of the file to his favorite work, the long
pondered and cherished Persiles. This, he assures Count Lemos, will be
either the best or the worst work ever produced by mortal man, and he
quickly adds that it will not be the worst. The terrible disease gains
upon him, laying its cold hand on his heart. He feels the pulsations
growing slower, but bates no jot of his cheerful philosophy. "With one
foot in the stirrup," he writes a last farewell of noble gratitude to
the viceroy of Naples. He makes his will, commanding that his body be
laid in the Convent of the Trinitarians. He had fixed his departure for
Sunday, the 17th of April, but waited six days for Shakespeare, and the
two greatest souls of that age went into the unknown together, on the
23d of April, 1616.
The burial of Cervantes was as humble as his christening. His bier was
borne on the shoulders of four brethren of his order. The upper half of
the coffin-lid was open and displayed the sharpened features to the few
who cared to see them: his right hand grasped a crucifix with the grip
of a soldier. Behind the grating was a sobbing nun whose name in the
world was Isabel de Saavedra. But there was no scenic effort or display,
such as a few years later in that same spot witnessed the laying away of
the mortal part of Vega-Carpio. This is the last of Cervantes upon
earth. He had fought a good fight. A long life had been devoted to his
country's service. In his youth he had poured out his blood, and dragged
the chains of captivity. In his age he had accomplished a work which
folds in with Spanish fame the orb of the world. But he was laid in his
grave like a pauper, and the spot where he lay was quickly forgotten. At
that very hour a vast multitude was assisting at what the polished
academician calls a "more solemn ceremony," the bearing of the Virgin of
the Atocha to the Convent of San Domingo el Real, to see if peradventure
pleased by the airing, she would send rain to the parching fields.
The world speedily did justice to his name. Even before his death it had
begun. The gentlemen of the French embassy who came to Madrid in 1615 to
arrange the royal marriages asked the chaplain of the Archbishop of
Toledo in his first visit many questions of Miguel Cervantes. The
chaplain happened to be a friend of the poet, and so replied, "I know
him. He is old, a soldier, a gentleman, and poor." At which they
wondered greatly. But after a while, when the whole civilized world had
trans-lated and knew the Quixote by heart, the Spaniards began to be
proud of the genius they had neglected and despised. They quote with a
certain fatuity the eulogy of Montesquieu, who says it is the only book
they have; "a proposition" which Navarrete considers "inexact," and we
agree with Navarrete. He has written a good book himself. The Spaniards
have very frankly accepted the judgment of the world, and although they
do not read Cervantes much, they admire him greatly, and talk about him
more than is amusing. The Spanish Academy has set up a pretty mural
tablet on the facade of the convent which shelters the tired bones of
the unlucky immortal, enjoying now their first and only repose. In the
Plaza of the Cortes a fine bronze statue stands facing the Prado,
catching on his chiselled curls and forehead the first rays of morning
that leap over the hill of the Retiro. It is a well-poised, energetic,
chivalrous figure, and Mr. Ger-mond de Lavigne has criticised it as
having more of the sabreur than the savant. The objection does not seem
well founded. It is not pleasant for the world to be continually
reminded of its meannesses. We do not want to see Cervantes's days of
poverty and struggle eternized in statues. We know that he always looked
back with fondness on his campaigning days, and even in his decrepit age
he called himself a soldier. If there were any period in that troubled
history that could be called happy, surely it was the time when he had
youth and valor and hope as the companions of his toil. It would have
been a precious consolation to his cheerless age to dream that he could
stand in bronze, as we hope he may stand for centuries, in the
unchanging bloom of manhood, with the cloak and sword of a gentleman and
soldier, bathing his Olympian brow forever in the light of all the
mornings, and gazing, at evening, at the rosy reflex flushing the
east,--the memory of the day and the promise of the dawn.