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
[Illustration: LETTER ADDRESSED BY CERVANTES TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF
TOLEDO, DATED MARCH 26TH, 1616.]
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
[Illustration]
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
[Illustration]
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
[Illustration]
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
[Illustration]
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_
[Illustration]
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.
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
[Illustration]
from the fame of Cervantes, it is one of those stories which the public
will not lightly relinquish.