THE LIFE OF CERVANTES
Some men live their romances, and some men write them. It was given to
Cervantes to do both, and, as his art was not of the impersonal order,
it is scarcely possible to read his work without a desire to know more
of the rich and imposing individuality which informs it. Posthumous
legends are apt to form round men of the heroic type who have been
neglected while alive, and posterity seems to enjoy this cheap form of
atonement. Cervantes is a case in point. But the researches of the last
few years have brought much new material to light, and have dissipated
a cloud of myths concerning him: we are not yet able to see him as he
was at every stage of his chequered career, but we are nearer him than
we ever were before. We are passing out of the fogs of fable, and are
learning that, in Cervantes’s case, facts are as strange as fiction—and
far more interesting.
It is a foible with the biographers of great men to furnish their
heroes with a handsome equipment of ancestors, and Cervantes’s
descent has been traced back to the end of the tenth century by
these amateur genealogists. We may admire their industry, and reject
their conclusions. It is quite possible that Cervantes was of good
family, but we cannot go further back than two generations. His
grandfather, Juan de Cervantes, appears to have been a country lawyer
who died, without attaining distinction or fortune, about the middle
of the sixteenth century. Juan’s son was Rodrigo de Cervantes who
married Leonor de Cortinas: and the great novelist was the fourth
of their seven children. Rodrigo de Cervantes was a lowly precursor
of Sangrado—a simple apothecary-surgeon, of inferior professional
status, seldom settled long in one place, earning a precarious living
by cupping and blistering. His son Miguel was born at Alcalá de
Henares—possibly, as his name suggests, on St. Michael’s Day (September
29)—and he was baptized there on Sunday, October 9, 1547, in the
church of Santa María la Mayor. There was a tradition that Cervantes
matriculated at Alcalá, and his name was discovered in the university
registers by an investigator who looked for it with the eye of faith.
This is one of many pleasing, pious legends. Rodrigo de Cervantes was
not in a position to send his sons to universities. A poor, helpless,
sanguine man, he wandered in quest of patients and fortune from Alcalá
to Valladolid, from Valladolid to Madrid, from Madrid to Seville,
and it has been conjectured that Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra spent
some time in the Jesuit school at Seville. The dog Berganza, in the
_Coloquio de los Perros_, recalls his edification at ‘seeing the
loving-kindness, the discretion, the solicitude and the skill with
which those saintly fathers and masters taught these lads, so that the
tender shoots of their youth should not be twisted, nor take a wrong
bend in the path of virtue which, together with the humane letters,
they continually pointed out to them.’ But it is evident that Cervantes
can have had little formal schooling. He was educated in the university
of practical experience, and picked up his learning as he could.
He made the most of his casual opportunities. Obviously the man who
wrote _Don Quixote_ must have read the books of chivalry, the leading
poets, the chronicles, dramatic romances like the _Celestina_,
picaresque novels like _Lazarillo de Tormes_, pastoral tales like
the _Diana_, the _cancioneros_, and countless broadsides containing
popular ballads; and he must have read them at this time, for his
maturer years were spent in campaigning, or in the discharge of petty,
exacting duties. In his early youth, too, he made acquaintance with
the theatre, witnessing the performances of the enterprising Lope de
Rueda, actor, manager and playwright, the first man in Spain to set
up a travelling booth, and bid for public support. The impression was
ineffaceable: from Cervantes’s account of his experience, given half a
century later, it may be gathered that he listened and watched with the
uncritical rapture of a clever, ardent lad, and that his ambition to
become a successful dramatist was born there and then. In the meantime,
while following his father in his futile journeys, he received a
liberal education. Jogging along the high-road, lodging in wayside
inns, strolling in market-places, he met men and women of all ranks,
from nobles to peasants, and thus began to hoard his literary capital.
Like most young men of literary ambition, Cervantes began by
versifying, and, as he never grew old in heart, he versified as long
as he lived. A sonnet, written between 1560 and 1568, has come to
light recently, and is interesting solely as the earliest extant work
of Cervantes. By 1566 he was settled in Madrid, and two years later
he wrote a series of elegiacs on the death of the Queen, Isabel de
Valois: these were published in a volume edited by Juan López de
Hoyos, a Madrid schoolmaster, who refers to Cervantes as his ‘dear and
beloved pupil.’ As the pupil was twenty before López de Hoyos’s school
was founded, the meaning of the phrase is obscure. Perhaps Cervantes
had been a pupil under López de Hoyos elsewhere: perhaps he was an
usher in López de Hoyos’s new school: frankly, we know nothing of his
circumstances. He makes his formal entry into literature, and then
vanishes out of sight, and apparently out of Spain. What happened to
him at this time is obscure. We know on his own statement that he was
once _camarero_ to Cardinal Giulio Acquaviva; we know that Acquaviva,
not yet a Cardinal, was in Madrid during the winter of 1568, and that
he started for Rome towards the end of the year; and we know from
documentary evidence that Cervantes was in Rome at the end of the
following year. How he got there, how and when he entered Acquaviva’s
service, or when and why he left it—these, as Sir Thomas Browne would
say, are all ‘matters of probable conjecture.’
While Cervantes was in Rome, a league was forming by Spain, Venice
and the Holy See against the Sultan Selim: war was in sight, and
every high-spirited young Spaniard in Italy must have felt that his
place was in the ranks. It has been thought that Cervantes served as
a supernumerary before he joined Acquaviva’s household; but we do
not reach solid ground till 1571 when Cervantes is discovered as a
soldier in a company commanded by Diego de Urbina, ‘a famous captain of
Guadalajara,’ as the Captive in _Don Quixote_ called him thirty-four
years later. Urbina’s company belonged to the celebrated _tercio_ of
Miguel de Moncada, and in September 1571 it was embarked at Messina on
the _Marquesa_, one of the galleys under the command of Don John of
Austria. At dawn on Sunday, October 7, Don John’s armada lay off the
Curzolarian Islands when two sail were sighted on the horizon, and soon
afterwards the Turkish fleet followed. Cervantes was ill with fever,
but refused to listen to his comrades who begged him to stay below:
death in the service of God and the King, he said, was preferable to
remaining under cover. The _Marquesa_ was in the hottest of the fight
at Lepanto, and when the battle was won Cervantes had received three
wounds, two in the chest, and one in the left hand. Like most old
soldiers, he loved to fight his battles over again, and, to judge from
his writings, he was at least as proud of having been at Lepanto as of
creating Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
He was in hospital for seven months at Messina, received an increase
of pay, and returned to duty in April 1572. This throws light upon a
personal matter. Current likenesses of Cervantes, all imaginary and
most of them mere variants of the portrait contrived in the eighteenth
century by William Kent, usually represent him as having lost an
arm. This is manifestly wrong: a one-armed private would have been
discharged as not worth his pay and rations. Cervantes was appointed to
Manuel Ponce de León’s company in the _tercio_ of Lope de Figueroa—the
vehement martinet who appears in Calderón’s _Alcalde de Zalamea_—and
took part in three campaigns; he was present at the fiasco of Navarino
in 1572, at the occupation of Tunis in 1573, and at the attempted
relief of the Goletta in 1574. He had already done garrison duty in
Genoa and Sardinia, and was now stationed successively at Palermo and
Naples. It was clear that there was to be no more fighting for a while,
and, as there was no opening for Cervantes in Italy, he determined to
seek promotion in Spain. Don John of Austria recommended him for a
company in one of the regiments then being raised for Italy, and laid
stress upon his ‘merits and services,’ and a similar recommendation
was made by the Duke of Sesa, Viceroy of Sicily. These flattering
credentials and testimonials were destined to cause much embarrassment
and suffering to the bearer; but they encouraged him to make for Spain
with a confident heart.
His optimism was to be put to the proof. On September 26, 1575, the
_Sol_, with Cervantes and his brother Rodrigo on board, was separated
from the rest of the Spanish squadron in the neighbourhood of Les
Saintes Maries near Marseilles, and was captured by Moorish pirates.
The desperate resistance of the Spaniards was unavailing; they were
overcome by superior numbers and were carried off to Algiers. What
follows would seem extravagant in a romance of adventures, but the
details are supported by irrefragable evidence. As Algiers was at this
time the centre of the slave-trade, the prisoners cannot have felt
much doubt as to what was in store for them. Cervantes’s first owner
was a certain Dali Mami, a Greek renegade, and captain of a galley. He
read the recommendatory letters from Don John of Austria and the Duke
of Sessa, and (not unnaturally) jumped at the conclusion that he had
drawn a prize: his slave might not be of great use so far as manual
labour was concerned, but any one who was personally acquainted with
two such personages as Don John and the Duke must presumably be a
man of consequence, and would assuredly be worth a heavy ransom. The
first result of this fictitious importance was that Cervantes was put
in irons, and chains; and, when these were at last removed, he was
carefully watched.
Cervantes found means to baffle his sentries. His first attempt to
escape was made in 1576: it was an ignominious failure. He and his
fellow-prisoners set out on foot to walk to Orán, the nearest Spanish
outpost; their Moorish guide played them false, and there was nothing
for it but to go back to Algiers. In 1577 Rodrigo de Cervantes was
ransomed—he was reckoned cheaper than his brother—and he undertook to
send a vessel to carry off Miguel and his friends. Meanwhile Cervantes
enlisted the sympathies of a Spanish renegade, a gardener from Navarre
named Juan; between them they dug out a cave in a garden near the sea,
and smuggled into it one by one fourteen Christian slaves who were
secretly fed during several months with the help of another renegade
from Melilla, a scoundrel known as _El Dorador_. It is easier to say
that the scheme was a bad one than to suggest anything better: it was
within an ace of succeeding. The vessel sent by Rodrigo de Cervantes
drew near the shore on September 28, and was on the point of embarking
those hidden in the cave when a Moorish fishing-boat passed by and
scared the crew, who stood out to sea again. A second attempt at a
rescue was made, but it was too late. The plot had been revealed by _El
Dorador_ to Hassan Pasha, the Dey of Algiers, and, when some of the
crew landed to convey the fugitives on board, the garden was surrounded
by Hassan’s troops. The entire band of Christians was captured, and
Cervantes at once avowed himself the sole organiser of the conspiracy.
Brought bound before Hassan, he adhered to his statement that his
comrades were innocent, and that he took the entire responsibility
for the plot. The gardener was hanged; after some hesitation, Hassan
decided to spare Cervantes’s life, and finally bought him from Dali
Mami for five hundred crowns.
It is difficult to account for this act of relative mercy in a man who
is described in _Don Quixote_ as the murderer of the human race, a
hæmatomaniac who delighted in murder for murder’s sake, one who hanged,
impaled, tortured and mutilated his prisoners every day. It may be
that he was genuinely struck by Cervantes’s unflinching courage; it
may be that he expected an immense ransom for a man who was plainly
the leader of the captives. What is certain is that Cervantes was now
Hassan’s slave; though imprisoned in irons, he soon showed that his
heroic spirit was unbroken. He sent a letter to Martín de Córdoba,
the governor of Orán, asking for aid to enable himself and three
other captives to escape; the messenger seemed likely to fulfil his
mission, but was arrested close to Orán, sent back, and impaled. For
writing the letter Cervantes was sentenced to two thousand blows,
but the sentence was remitted, and it would almost seem as though
Cervantes completely forgot the incident, for in _Don Quixote_ he goes
out of his way to record that _un tal Saavedra_—a certain Saavedra,
Something-or-Other Saavedra (who can be nobody but himself)—was never
struck by Hassan, and was never threatened by Hassan with a blow. This
may appear perplexing, but as the writer goes on to say that Hassan
never addressed a harsh word to this Saavedra, it is plain that the
whole passage is an idealistic arabesque; the discrepancy between the
gloss and the facts shows the danger of seeking exact biographical
data in any imaginative work, however heavily freighted with personal
reminiscences.
Hassan remitted the sentence, and, remarking that ‘so long as he had
the maimed Spaniard in custody, his Christians, ships and the entire
city were safe,’ he redoubled his vigilance. For two years the prisoner
made no move, but plainly he was not resigned nor disheartened, for he
conceived the idea of inducing the Christian population of Algiers to
rise and capture the city. It was no mad, impossible project; a similar
rising had been successful at Tunis in 1535, and there were over twenty
thousand Christians in Algiers. Once more Cervantes was betrayed, and
once more he escaped death. A less ambitious scheme also miscarried. In
1579 he took into his confidence a Spanish renegade and two Valencian
traders, and persuaded the Valencians to provide an armed vessel to
rescue him and some sixty other Christian slaves; but before the plan
could be carried out it was revealed to Hassan by a Dominican monk,
Juan Blanco de Paz. Very little is known of Blanco de Paz, except that
he came from Montemolín near Llerena, and that he gave himself out as
being a commissary and familiar of the Inquisition. Why he should turn
informer at all, is a mystery: why he should single out Cervantes as
the special object of his hatred is no less a mystery. The Valencian
merchants got wind of his treachery, and, dreading lest they might be
implicated, begged Cervantes to make his escape on a ship which was
about to start for Spain. To accept this proposal would have been to
desert his friends and to imperil their lives: Cervantes rejected it,
assuring the alarmed Valencians that he would not reveal anything to
compromise them, even if he were tortured. He was as good as his word.
Brought into Hassan’s presence with his hands tied behind him and the
hangman’s rope round his neck, he was threatened with instant death
unless he gave up the names of his accomplices. But he was undaunted
and immovable, asserting that the plot had been planned by himself and
four others who had got away, and that no one else had any active share
in it. Perhaps there was a certain economy of truth in this statement,
but it served its immediate purpose: though Cervantes was placed under
stricter guard, Hassan spared the other sixty slaves involved.
This was Cervantes’s last attempt to escape. His family were doing
what they could to procure his release. They were miserably poor,
and poverty often drives honest people into strange courses. To
excite pity, and so obtain a concession which would help towards
ransoming her son, Cervantes’s mother passed herself off as a widow,
though her husband was still alive, a superfluous old man, now grown
incurably deaf, and with fewer patients than ever. By means of such
dubious expedients some two hundred and fifty ducats were collected
and entrusted to Fray Juan Gil and Fray Antón de la Bella, two monks
engaged in ransoming the Christian slaves at Algiers. The sum was
insufficient. Hassan curtly told Fray Juan Gil that all his slaves
were gentlemen, that he should not part with any of them for less than
five hundred ducats, and that for Jerónimo de Palafox (apparently
an Aragonese of some position) he should ask a ransom of a thousand
ducats. Fray Juan Gil was specially anxious to release Palafox, and
made an offer of five hundred ducats; but Hassan would not abate his
terms. The Dey and the monk haggled from spring till autumn. Hassan
then went out of office, and made ready to leave for Constantinople to
give an account of his stewardship. His slaves were already embarked
on September 19, 1580, when Fray Juan Gil, seeing that there was no
hope of obtaining Palafox’s release by payment of five hundred ducats,
ransomed Cervantes for that sum. It is disconcerting to think that,
if the Trinitarian friar had been able to raise another five hundred
ducats, we might never have had _Don Quixote_. Palafox would have been
set at liberty, while Cervantes went up the Dardanelles to meet a
violent death in a last attempt at flight.
He stepped ashore a free man after five years of slavery, but his
trials in Algiers were not ended. The enigmatic villain of the drama,
Juan Blanco de Paz, had been busy trumping up false charges to be
lodged against Cervantes in Spain. It was a base and despicable act
duly denounced by the biographers; but we have reason to be grateful
to Blanco de Paz, for Cervantes met the charges by summoning eleven
witnesses to character who testified before Fray Juan Gil. Their
evidence proves that Cervantes was recognised as a man of singular
courage, kindliness, piety and virtue; that his authority among his
fellow-prisoners had excited the malicious jealousy of Blanco de
Paz who endeavoured to corrupt some of the witnesses; and—ludicrous
detail!—that the informer had been rewarded for his infamy with a ducat
and a jar of butter. This testimony, recorded by a notary, is confirmed
by the independent evidence of Fray Juan Gil himself, and by Doctor
Antonio de Sosa, a prisoner of considerable importance who answered the
twenty-five interrogatories in writing. The enquiry makes us acquainted
with all the circumstances of Cervantes’s captivity, and shows that
he was universally regarded as an heroic leader by those best able to
judge.
His vindication being complete, he left Algiers for Denia on October
24, and reached Madrid at some date previous to December 18. His
position was lamentable. He was in his thirty-fourth year, and had
to begin life again. Perhaps if Don John had lived, Cervantes might
have returned to the army; but Don John was dead, and his memory was
not cherished at court. Cervantes had no degree, no profession, no
trade, no craft except that of sonneteering: his life had been spent
in the service of the King, and he endeavoured to obtain some small
official post. Accordingly he made for Portugal, recently annexed by
Philip II., tried to find an opening, and was sent as King’s messenger
to Orán with instructions to call at Mostaganem with despatches
from the Alcalde. The mission was speedily executed, and Cervantes
found himself adrift. He settled in Madrid, made acquaintance with
some prominent authors of the day, and, in default of more lucrative
employment, betook himself to literature. He was always ready to
furnish a friend with a eulogistic sonnet on that friend’s immortal
masterpiece, and thus acquired a certain reputation as a facile,
fluent versifier. But sonnets are expensive luxuries, and Cervantes
wanted bread. He earned it by writing for the stage: to this period
no doubt we must assign the _Numancia_ and _Los Tratos de Argel_,
as well as many other pieces which have not survived. Cervantes was
like the players in _Hamlet_. Seneca was not too heavy, nor Plautus
too light for him: he was ready to supply ‘tragedy, comedy, history,
pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical,
tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem
unlimited.’ It was a hard struggle to keep the wolf from the door,
but perhaps this was the happiest period of Cervantes’s life. He was
on friendly terms with poets like Pedro de Padilla and Juan Rufo
Gutiérrez; managers did not pay him lavishly for his plays, but at
least they were set upon the stage, and the applause of the pit was to
him the sweetest music in the world. Moreover, following the example
of his friend Luis Gálvez de Montalvo, he was engaged upon a prose
pastoral, and, with his optimistic nature, he easily persuaded himself
that this romance would make his reputation—and perhaps his fortune.
He was now nearing the fatal age of forty, and it was high time to
put away the follies of youth. Breaking off a fugitive amour with a
certain Ana Franca (more probably Francisca) de Rojas, he married a
girl of nineteen, Catalina de Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano, daughter
of a widow owning a moderate estate at Esquivias, a small town near
Toledo, then famous for its wine, as Cervantes is careful to inform us.
Doubtless his courtship was like Othello’s.
I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field,
Of hair-breadth ‘scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
And portance in my travels’ history.
This to hear would Catalina seriously incline, yet there is reason
to think that the members of her family were less susceptible, and
regarded Cervantes as an undesirable suitor. He undoubtedly was, from
a mundane point of view; but the marriage took place on December 12,
1584, and next spring the First Part of _La Galatea_ (which had been
licensed in the previous February) was published. It is perhaps not
without significance that the volume was issued at Alcalá de Henares:
it would have been more natural and probably more advantageous to
publish the book at Madrid where Cervantes resided, but his name
carried no weight with the booksellers of the capital, and no doubt he
was glad enough to strike a bargain with his fellow-townsman Blas de
Robles. Robles behaved handsomely, for he paid the author, then unknown
outside a small literary circle, a fee of 1336 _reales_—say £30, equal
(we are told) to nearly £150 nowadays. Perhaps some modern novelists
have received even less for their first work. With this small capital
the newly-married couple set up house in Madrid: the bride had indeed a
small dowry including forty-five chickens, but the dowry was not made
over to her till twenty months later. The marriage does not seem to
have been unhappy, as marriages go; but, owing to Cervantes’s wandering
existence, the pair saw little of each other till the last ten or
twelve years of their married life.
By the death of his father on June 13, 1585, Cervantes became the
head of the family, and the position was no sinecure. His sister
Luisa had entered the convent of Barefooted Carmelites at Alcalá de
Henares twenty years before this date, and his brother Rodrigo had been
promoted to a commission in the army for his signal gallantry at the
Azores. But Cervantes’s mother and his sisters, Andrea and Magdalena,
were unprovided for, and looked to him for help. He resumed writing
for the stage, and is found witnessing a legal document at the request
of Inés Osorio, wife of the theatrical manager Jerónimo Velázquez,
with whose name that of Lope de Vega is unpleasantly associated. Now,
if not earlier,—as a complimentary allusion in the _Galatea_ might
suggest—Cervantes must have met that marvellous youth who was shortly
to become the most popular dramatist of the age. Meanwhile Cervantes’s
affairs were going ill. According to his own statement he wrote from
twenty to thirty plays between 1582 and 1587; but these plays cannot
have brought him much money, for there are proofs that some of his
family sold outright to a pawnbroker certain articles which Cervantes
had left in pledge two years before. Clearly he was hard pressed.
He eked out his income by accepting other work unconnected with
literature, executed business commissions as far away as Seville, and
looked around for permanent employment. He found it as commissary to
the Invincible Armada which was then fitting out, and in the autumn
of 1587 he took up his new duties in Andalusia. This amounts to a
confession of defeat. If a man of exceptional literary genius can
thrive on literature, he does not abandon it for a less agreeable
occupation. It is a fine thing to write masterpieces, but in order to
write them you must contrive to live. Cervantes’s masterpieces lay in
the future, and in the meantime he felt the pinch of hunger.
He appears to have obtained his appointment through the influence of
a judge in the High Court of Seville, Diego de Valdivia, a namesake
of the affable captain in _El Licenciado Vidriera_; and, after a few
months’ probation, his appointment was confirmed anew in January 1588.
He had already discovered that there were serious inconveniences
attaching to his post, for he had incurred excommunication for an
irregular seizure of wheat at Écija. It would be tedious to follow him
in his professional visits to the outlying districts of Andalusia.
Everything comes to an end at last—even the equipment of the Invincible
Armada: when the fleet sailed to meet the enemy Cervantes cheered it on
to victory with an enthusiastic ode, and in a second ode he deplored
the great catastrophe. He continued in the public service as commissary
to the galleys, collecting provisions at a salary of twelve _reales_
a day, making Seville his centre, and lodging in the house of Tomás
Gutiérrez. Weary of the sordid life, he applied in 1590 for a post in
America, but failed to obtain it. At the end of the petition, Doctor
Núñez Morquecho wrote: ‘Let him seek some employment hereabouts.’
Blessings on Doctor Núñez Morquecho, the conscientious official! If he
had granted the petitioner’s request, Cervantes might have been more
prosperous, but he would not have written _Don Quixote_. He was forced
to remain where he was, engulfed in arid and vexatious routine.
Still one would imagine that he must have discharged his duties
efficiently, for he was one of four commissaries specially commended to
the King in January 1592 by the new Purveyor-General Pedro de Isunza.
Meanwhile his condition grew rather worse than better: his poverty was
extreme. The financial administration was thoroughly disorganised,
and in 1591 Cervantes had not yet received his salary for 1588. He
seems (not unnaturally) to have lost interest in his work, and to have
become responsible for the indiscreet proceedings of a subordinate at
Teba. Henceforward he was in constant trouble with the authorities.
In August 1592 his accounts were found to be irregular, and his five
sureties were compelled to pay the balance; he was imprisoned at Castro
del Río in September for alleged illegal perquisitioning at Écija,
but was released on appeal. Now and then he was tempted to return to
literature. He signed a contract at Seville early in September 1592
undertaking to furnish the manager, Rodrigo Osorio, with six plays at
fifty ducats apiece: the conditions of the agreement were that Osorio
was to produce each play within twenty days of its being delivered to
him, and that Cervantes was to receive nothing unless the play was ‘one
of the best that had been acted in Spain.’ The imprisonment at Castro
del Río a fortnight later interfered with this project: no more is
heard of it, and Cervantes resumed his work as commissary. Two points
of personal interest are to be noted in the ensuing years: in the
autumn of 1593 Cervantes lost his mother, and in the autumn of 1594
he visited Baza, where (as Sr. Rodríguez Marín has shown recently in
an open letter addressed to me[99]) his old enemy Blanco de Paz was
residing. As the population of Baza amounted only to 1537 persons at
the time, the two men may easily have met: the encounter would have
been worth witnessing, for Cervantes was a master of pointed expression.
He passed on his dreary round to Málaga and Ronda, returning to his
headquarters at Seville, where, most likely, he wrote the poem in
honour of St. Hyacinth which won the first prize at Saragossa on May
7, 1595. As the prize consisted of three silver spoons, it did not
greatly relieve his financial embarrassments. These rapidly grew worse.
Cervantes had deposited public moneys with a Portuguese banker in
Seville; the banker failed and fled, and, as Cervantes was unable to
refund the amount, he was suspended. There is a blank in his history
from September 1595 to January 1597, when the money was recovered from
the bankrupt’s estate. Cervantes, however, was not restored to his
post. This is not surprising; for, though most of us regard him with an
affection as real as can be felt for any one who has been in his grave
nearly three hundred years, even our partiality stops short of calling
him a model official. He was not cast in the official mould. Cervantes,
collecting oil and wrangling over corn in Andalusia, is like Samson
grinding in the prison house at Gaza. Misfortune pursued him. The
treasury accountants called upon him to furnish sureties that he would
attend the Exchequer Court at Madrid within twenty days of receiving a
summons dated September 6, 1597. Unable to find bail, he was imprisoned
till the beginning of December, when he was released with instructions
to present himself at Madrid within thirty days. He does not appear to
have left Seville, and he neglected a similar summons in February 1599.
This may seem like contempt of court, but no doubt the real explanation
is that he had not the money to pay for the journey.
On July 2, 1600, Rodrigo de Cervantes, then an ensign serving under
the Archduke Albert in Flanders, was killed in action; but Miguel de
Cervantes probably did not hear of this till long afterwards. He now
vanishes from sight, for there is another blank in his record from
May 1601 to February 1603. We may assume that he lived in extreme
poverty at Seville, and when next heard of—at Valladolid in 1603—his
circumstances had not greatly improved. His sister Andrea was employed
as needlewoman by the Marqués de Villafranca, and her little bill
is made out in Cervantes’s handwriting: clearly every member of the
family contributed to the household expenses, and every _maravedí_ was
welcome. Presumably Cervantes had come to Valladolid in obedience to a
peremptory _mandamus_ from the Exchequer Court. A brief enquiry must
have convinced the registrars that, with the best will in the world,
he was not in a position to make good the sum which (as they alleged)
was due to the treasury, and they left him in peace for three years
with a cloud over him. He had touched bottom. He had valiantly endured
the buffets of fortune, and was now about to enter into his reward.
His mind to him a kingdom was, and during the years of his disgrace
in Seville he had lived, unhindered by squalid circumstance, in a
pleasaunce of reminiscence and imagination. All other doors being
closed to him, he returned to the house of literature, took pen and
paper, gave literary form to his experiences and imaginings, and, when
drawing on to sixty, produced the masterpiece which has made his name
immortal. It may well be, as he himself hints, that _Don Quixote_ was
begun in Seville jail: perhaps it was finished there. At any rate there
was little to be added to it when the author reached Valladolid in
1603—little beyond the preface and burlesque preliminary verses. By
the summer of 1604 Cervantes had found a publisher, and it had leaked
out that the book contained some caustic references to distinguished
contemporaries. This may account for Lope de Vega’s opinion, expressed
in August 1604 (six months before the work was published), that ‘no
poet is as bad as Cervantes, nor so silly as to praise _Don Quixote_.’
This was not precisely a happy forecast. _Don Quixote_ appeared early
in 1605, was hailed with delight, and received the dubious compliment
of being pirated in Lisbon. Cervantes was the man of the moment, in the
first flush of his popularity, when chance played him an unpleasant
trick. On the night of June 27, 1605, a Navarrese gallant named Gaspar
de Ezpeleta was wounded while in the neighbourhood of the Calle del
Rastro, called for aid at the door of No. 11 where Cervantes lodged,
was helped into the house, and died there two days later. The inmates
were arrested on suspicion, examined by the magistrate, and released
on July 1. The minutes of the examination were unpublished till
recent years, and these furtive tactics gravely injured the memory of
Cervantes, for they suggested the idea that the examination revealed
something to his discredit. It reveals that Cervantes’s natural
daughter, Isabel de Saavedra (whose mother, Ana Franca de Rojas, had
died in 1599 or earlier), was now residing with her father; it proves
that Cervantes was still poor, and that calumnious gossip was current
in Valladolid; but there is not a tittle of evidence to show that any
member of the Cervantes family ever heard of Ezpeleta till he came by
his death.
Cervantes had made for himself a great reputation, but _Don Quixote_
did not apparently enrich him: otherwise he would not have asked his
publisher for an advance of 450 _reales_, as we know that he did at
some date previous to November 23, 1607. However, we must renounce the
pretension to understand Cervantes’s financial affairs. His daughter
Isabel, who was unmarried in 1605, reappears in 1608 as the widow of
Diego Sanz del Aguila, and as the mother of a daughter: in 1608 she
married a certain Luis de Molina, and there are complicated statements
respecting a house in the Red de San Luis from which it is impossible
to gather whether the house belonged to Isabel, to her daughter, or
to her father. We cannot wonder that Cervantes was the despair of the
Treasury officials: these officials did, indeed, make a last attempt
to extract an explanation from him on November 6 of this very year of
1608, and thenceforward left him in peace.
He settled in Madrid to pass his serene old age. An atmosphere of
devotion began to reign in the house in the Calle de la Magdalena
where he lived with his wife and his sisters, Andrea and Magdalena.
In 1609 he was among the first to join the newly founded Confraternity
of the Slaves of the Most Blessed Sacrament; in the same year his
wife received the habit of the Tertiaries of St. Francis, as also
did Andrea who died four months later (October 9); in 1610 his wife
and his surviving sister Magdalena both became professed Tertiaries
of St. Francis. It would appear that Cervantes had been aided by
the generosity of the Conde de Lemos, and he could not hide his
deep chagrin at not being invited to join the household when Lemos
was nominated to the viceroyalty of Naples in 1610. The new viceroy
chose better than he knew. Cervantes applied himself more closely to
literature which he had neglected (so far as publication goes) for
the last five years, and, after the death of his sister Magdalena
in 1611, the results of his renewed activity were visible. In 1612,
when he became a member of the Academia Selvaje (where we hear of his
lending a wretched pair of spectacles to Lope de Vega), he finished
his _Novelas Exemplares_ which appeared next year. He published his
serio-comic poem, the _Viage del Parnaso_, in 1614; in 1615 he issued a
volume containing eight plays and eight interludes, and also published
the Second Part of _Don Quixote_. It is curious that so many things
which must have seemed misfortunes to Cervantes have proved to be
a gain to us. In 1614 an apocryphal _Don Quixote_ was published at
Tarragona by Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda of whom nothing has been
discovered, and this spurious sequel contained a preface filled with
insolent personalities. If Cervantes had received any one of the
appointments in Spanish America for which he petitioned, we should
not have had the first _Don Quixote_; if he had gone to Naples with
Lemos we should never have had the second; if it had not been for
Avellaneda’s insults, we might have had only an unfinished sequel.
Cervantes’s life was now drawing to a close, but his industry was
prodigious. Apart from fugitive verses he was engaged on _Los Trabajos
de Persiles y Sigismunda_, on a play entitled _El Engaño á los ojos_,
the long-promised continuation of the _Galatea_, and two works which
he proposed to call _Las Semanas del Jardín_ and _El famoso Bernardo_.
All are lost to us except _Persiles y Sigismunda_ which appeared
posthumously in 1617.
We catch interesting glimpses of Cervantes in the last phase. He has
left a verbal portrait of himself as he looked when he was sixty-six,
and it is the only authentic portrait of him in existence. He was ‘of
aquiline features, with chestnut hair, smooth and unclouded brow,
bright eyes, and a nose arched, though well proportioned, silver beard,
once golden twenty years ago, long moustache, small mouth, teeth of
no consequence, since he had only six and these in ill condition and
worse placed, inasmuch as they do not correspond to one another;
stature about the average, neither tall nor short, ruddy complexion,
fair rather than dark, slightly stooped in the shoulders, and not very
active on his feet.’ Two years later Noel Brûlart de Sillery came to
Madrid on a special mission from the French Court, and his suite were
intensely curious to hear what they could of Cervantes; they learned
that he was ‘old, a soldier, a gentleman, and poor.’ At this time, his
health must have begun to fail: it was undoubtedly failing fast while
he wrote _Persiles y Sigismunda_. He was apparently dependent on the
bounty of Lemos and of Bernardo de Sandoval, the Cardinal-Archbishop
of Toledo. The hand of death was on him when he wrote to the Cardinal
on March 26, 1616, a letter expressing his gratitude for a recent
benefaction. On April 2 he was professed as a Tertiary of St. Francis,
and the profession took place at the house in the Calle de León to
which he had removed in 1611 or earlier. He was never to leave it
again alive: on April 18 he received Extreme Unction; on April 19 he
wrote the celebrated dedication of _Persiles y Sigismunda_ to Lemos;
on April 23 he died, and on April 24 he was buried in the convent of
the Trinitarian nuns in the Calle del Humilladero—the street which
now bears the name of his great rival Lope. His wife outlived him by
ten years, and his daughter by thirty-six; we hear no more of his
granddaughter after 1608. Presumably she died in infancy: if so, the
family became extinct upon the death of Isabel de Saavedra in 1652.
Cervantes was no bloodless ascetic, no incarnation of dreary
righteousness: we do him wrong, if we present him in that crude,
intolerable light. With some defects of character and with some lapses
of conduct, he is a more interesting and more attractive personality
than if he were—what perhaps no one has ever been—a bundle of almost
impossible perfections. He was even as we are, but far nobler—braver,
more resigned to disappointment, more patient with the folly which
springs eternal in each of us. This inexhaustible sympathy, even more
than his splendid genius, is the secret of his conquering charm. He is
one of ourselves, only incomparably greater.
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, ‘This was a man.’
But it is not for us to write his epitaph. He needs no marble
sepulchre, and he has none, for the precise spot where he rests is
unknown. He has built himself a lordlier and more imperishable monument
than we could fashion for him—a monument which will endure so long as
humour, wisdom, and romance enchant mankind.