THE WORKS OF CERVANTES
The best and wisest of men have their delusions—especially with respect
to themselves and their capabilities—and Cervantes was not free from
such natural infirmities. He made his first appearance in literature
with a sonnet addressed to Philip II.’s third wife, Isabel de Valois,
and as this poem is not included in any Spanish edition of his works, I
make no apology for quoting it (in an English version by Norman MacColl
which has not yet been published).
Most Gracious Queen, within whose breast prevail
What thoughts to mortals by God’s grace do come,
Oh general refuge of Christendom,
Whose fame for piety can never fail.
Oh happy armour! with that well-meshed mail
Great Philip clothed himself, our sovereign,
Illustrious King of the broad lands of Spain,
Who fortune and the world holds in his baile.
What genius would adventure to proclaim
The good that thine example teaches us;
If thou wert summoned to the realms of day,
Who in thy mortal state put’st us to shame?
Better it is to feel and mutter ‘hush,’
Than what is difficult to say, aloud to say.
This is not a masterpiece in little, nor even a marvel of adroitness;
but it is highly interesting as the earliest extant effort of one who
was destined to become a master, and, moreover, it supplies us with his
favourite poetical formulæ. In his description of the Queen as the
general refuge of Christendom,
Whose fame for piety can never fail;
in his allusion to the
Illustrious King of the broad lands of Spain,
Who fortune and the world holds in his baile;
Cervantes strikes the characteristic notes of devotion, patriotism,
and loyalty to his sovereign. Though he vastly enlarged the circle of
his themes later on, he was sufficiently representative of his own
time and country to introduce these three motives into his subsequent
writings whenever a plausible occasion offered. This is particularly
notable in his fugitive verses. Sainte-Beuve says that nearly all men
are born poets, but that, as a rule, the poet in us dies young. It
was not so with Cervantes—so far as impulse was concerned. From youth
to old age he was a persistent versifier. As we have seen, he first
appeared in print with elegiacs on the death of Isabel de Valois; as a
slave in Algiers he dedicated sonnets to Bartolomeo Ruffino, and from
Algiers also he appealed for help to Mateo Vázquez in perhaps the most
spirited and sincere of his poetical compositions; he was not long free
from slavery when he supplied Juan Rufo Gutiérrez with a resounding
patriotic sonnet, and Pedro de Padilla with devotional poems. As he
began, so he continued. He has made merry at the practice of issuing
books with eulogistic prefatory poems; but he observed the custom in
his own _Galatea_, and he was indefatigable in furnishing such verses
to his friends. All subjects came alike to him. He would as soon praise
the quips and quillets of López Maldonado as lament the death of the
famous admiral Santa Cruz, and he celebrated with equal promptitude a
tragic epic on the lovers of Teruel and a technical treatise on kidney
diseases. It must, I think, be allowed that Cervantes was readily
stirred into song.
At the end of his career, in his mock-heroic _Viage del Parnaso_, he
cast a backward glance at his varied achievement in literature, and,
with his usual good judgment, admitted wistfully that nature had denied
him the gift of poetry. As the phrase stands, and baldly interpreted,
it would seem that excessive modesty had led Cervantes to underestimate
his powers. He was certainly endowed with imagination, and with a
beautifying vision; but, though he had the poet’s dream, he had not
the faculty of verbal magic. It was not given to him to wed immortal
thoughts to immortal music, and this no doubt is what he means us to
understand by his ingenuous confession. His verdict is eminently just.
Cervantes has occasional happy passages, even a few admirable moments,
but no lofty or sustained inspiration. He recognised the fact with that
transparent candour which has endeared him to mankind, not dreaming
that uncritical admirers in future generations would seek to crown him
with the laurel to which he formally resigned all claim. Yet we read
appreciations of him as a ‘great’ poet, and we can only marvel at such
misuse of words. If Cervantes be a ‘great’ poet, what adjective is left
to describe Garcilaso, Luis de León, Lope de Vega, Góngora and Calderón?
A sense of measure, of relative values, is the soul of criticism, and
we may be appreciative without condescending to idolatry, or even
to flattery. Cervantes was a rapid, facile versifier, and at rare
intervals his verses are touched with poetry; but, for the most part,
they are imitative, and no imitation, however brilliant, is a title to
lasting fame. Imitation in itself is no bad sign in a beginner; it is
a healthier symptom than the adoption of methods which are wilfully
eccentric; but it is a provisional device, to be used solely as a means
of attaining one’s originality. It cannot be said that Cervantes ever
acquired a personal manner in verse: if he had, there would be far less
division of opinion as to whether he is, or is not, the author of such
and such poems. He finally acquired a personal manner in prose, but
only after an arduous probation.
There are few traces of originality in his earliest prose work, the
First Part of _La Galatea_, the pastoral which Cervantes never found
time to finish during more than thirty years. I do not think we need
suppose that we have lost a masterpiece, though no doubt it would
be profoundly interesting to see Cervantes trying to pour new wine
into old bottles. The sole interest of the _Galatea_, as we have it,
is that it is the first essay in fiction of a great creator who has
mistaken his road. There does appear to have existed, long before
the composition of the Homeric poems, a primitive pastoral which
was popular in character. So historians tell us, and no doubt they
are right. But the extant pastoral poetry of Sicily is the latest
manifestation of Greek genius, an artistic revolt against the banal
conventions of civilisation, an attempt to express a longing for a
freer life in a purer air. In other words it is an artificial product.
The Virgilian eclogues are still more remote from reality than the
idyls of Theocritus: as imitations are bound to be. Artificiality is
even more pronounced in the _Arcadia_ of Sannazaro who ‘prosified’ the
Virgilian eclogue during the late Renaissance: what else do you expect
in an imitation of an imitation? Neither in Sannazaro, nor in his
disciple Cervantes, is there a glimpse of real shepherds, nor even of
the Theocritean shepherds,—
Such as sat listening round Apollo’s pipe,
When the great deity, for earth too ripe,
Let his divinity o’erflowing die
In music, through the vales of Thessaly.
What we find in the _Galatea_ is the imitation by Cervantes of
Sannazaro’s prose imitation of Virgil’s imitation of Theocritus. To
us who wish for nothing better than to read Cervantes himself, his
ambition to write like somebody else seems misplaced, not to say
grotesque. But then, for most of us, Sannazaro has only a relative
importance: to Cervantes, Sannazaro was almost Virgil’s peer.
Everything connected with the _Galatea_ is imitative—the impulse to
write it, the matter, and the manner. The _Galatea_ is no spontaneous
product of the author’s fancy; it owes its existence to Sannazaro’s
_Arcadia_, and to the early Spanish imitations of the _Arcadia_
recorded in Professor Rennert’s exhaustive monograph. We shall not be
far wrong in thinking that it might never have struggled into print,
had not Cervantes been encouraged by the example of his friend Luis
Gálvez de Montalvo, who had made a hit with _El Pastor de Fílida_.
So, too, as regards the matter of the _Galatea_. The sixth book is a
frank adaptation of the _Arcadia_; there are further reminiscences
of Sannazaro’s pastoral in both the verse and the prose of the
_Galatea_; other allusions are worked in without much regard to their
appropriateness; León Hebreo is not too lofty, nor Alonso Pérez too
lowly, to escape Cervantes’s depredations. Lastly, the manner is no
less imitative: construction, arrangement, distribution, diction are
all according to precedent. Martínez Marina, indeed, held the odd view
that there was something new in the style of the _Galatea_, and that
Cervantes and Mariana were the first to move down the steep slope
that leads to _culteranismo_. During the hundred years that Martínez
Marina’s theory has been before the world it has made no converts, and
therefore it needs no refutation. But, though the theory is mistaken,
some of the facts advanced to support it are indubitable: the _Galatea_
is deliberately latinised in imitation of Sannazaro who sought to
reproduce the sustained and sonorous melody of the Ciceronian period.
So intent is Cervantes upon the model that his own personality is
overwhelmed. He probably never wrote with more scrupulous care than
when at work on the _Galatea_, yet all his pains and all his elaborate
finish are so much labour lost. Briefly, the _Galatea_ is little more
than the echo of an echo, and the individual quality of Cervantes’s
voice is lost amid the reverberations of exotic music.
The sixteenth-century prose-pastoral was a barren product, rooted in
a false convention. It was not natural, and it was not artistic: it
failed to reproduce the beauty of the old ideal, and it failed to
create a modern ideal. It satisfies no canon, and to attempt to make a
case for it is to argue for argument’s sake. Had Cervantes continued
to work this vein, he would never have found his true path, and must
have remained an imitator till the end; and it is a mere chance that
he did not return to the pastoral and complete the _Galatea_. It was
far too often in his thoughts. As his butt Feliciano de Silva would
have said, his reason saw ‘the unreason of the reason with which the
reason is afflicted’ when given up to the composition of pastorals;
and yet the pastoral romance had a fascination for him. Fortunately,
he was saved from a fatal error by the fact that, for nearly twenty
years after the publication of the _Galatea_, he was kept against
his will in touch with the realities of life: realities often grim,
squalid, fantastic, cruel and absurd, but preferable to the pointless
philanderings of imaginary swains and nymphs in a pasteboard Arcadia.
The surly taxpayers from whom Cervantes had to wring contributions,
the clergy who excommunicated and imprisoned him, the alcaldes and
jacks-in-office who made his life a burden, the cheating landlords
and strumpets whom he met in miserable inns—these people were not
the crown and flower of the human race, but they were not intangible
abstractions, nor even persistent bores; they were plain men and
women, creatures of flesh and blood, subject to all the passions of
humanity, and using vigorous, natural speech instead of euphemisms and
preciosities. It was by contact with these rugged folk that Cervantes
amassed his wealth of observation, and slowly learned his trade. This
was precisely what he needed. After his return from Algiers, and till
his marriage, circumstances had thrown him into a literary clique,
well-read and well-meaning, but with no vital knowledge of the past
and no intellectual interest in the present. The destiny which drove
Cervantes to collect provisions and taxes in the villages of the south
saved him from the Byzantinism of the capital, and placed him once more
in direct relation with nature—especially human nature. This was his
salvation as an author. And eighteen years later he produced the First
Part of _Don Quixote_.
It would be interesting to know the exact stages of composition of _Don
Quixote_, but that is hopeless. We cannot be sure as to when Cervantes
began the book, but we may hazard a conjecture. Bernardo de la Vega’s
_Pastor de Iberia_, one of the books in Don Quixote’s library, was
published in 1591, and this goes to prove that the sixth chapter was
written after this date—probably a good deal later, for this pastoral
was a failure, and therefore not likely to come at once into the hands
of a busy, roving tax-gatherer. You all remember the incident of Sancho
Panza’s being tossed in a blanket, and there is a very similar episode
in the Third Book of _Guzmán de Alfarache_. Is there any relation
between the two? Is it a case of unconscious reminiscence, or is it
simple coincidence? It would be absurd to suppose that Cervantes
deliberately took such a trifling incident from a book published six
years before his own. Where Cervantes is imitative is in the dedication
of the First Part of _Don Quixote_, which is pieced together from
Herrera’s dedication of his edition of Garcilaso to the Marqués de
Ayamonte, and from Francisco de Medina’s prologue to the same edition.
If the tossing of Sancho Panza were suggested by _Guzmán de Alfarache_,
it would follow that the seventeenth chapter of _Don Quixote_ was
written in 1599, or later, and a remark dropped by Ginés de Pasamonte
seems to show that Cervantes had read Mateo Alemán’s book without any
excessive admiration. But the point is scarcely worth labouring. My
own impression is that _Don Quixote_ was progressing, but was not yet
finished, in 1602.
Consider the facts a moment! So far as external evidence goes we have
no information concerning Cervantes from May 1601 to February 1603,
but I suggest that he was in Seville during 1602. We know that Lope
de Vega was constantly in Seville from 1600 to 1604, and we know
that Cervantes wrote a complimentary sonnet for the edition of the
_Dragontea_ issued by Lope in 1602. The inference is that Cervantes
and Lope were on friendly terms at this date, and it is therefore
incredible that Cervantes had written—or even contemplated writing—the
sharp attack on Lope in the forty-seventh chapter of _Don Quixote_.
During the course of 1602 differences arose to separate the two men,
and thenceforward Cervantes felt free to treat Lope as an ordinary
mortal, an author who invited trenchant criticism. This would lead
us to suppose that _Don Quixote_ was not actually finished till just
before Cervantes’s departure to Valladolid at the beginning of 1603,
and it would also explain how Lope de Vega became acquainted with the
contents of _Don Quixote_ before it was actually published. Cervantes
is pleasantly chatty and confidential in print respecting the books
upon which he is at work; he is not likely to have been more reserved
in private conversation with a friend. And it is intrinsically probable
that at this difficult period of his life Cervantes may have made many
confidences to Lope concerning his projects.
At first sight it may seem odd that we hear nothing of Cervantes’s
mingling in the literary circles of Seville; it may seem still more
strange, if we take into consideration the fact that several of the
poets whom he had praised in the _Galatea_ were then living in Seville.
But there is nothing strange about it, if we look at men and things
from a contemporary point of view. The plain truth is that at this
time Cervantes was a nobody in the eyes of educated people at Seville.
His steps had been persistently dogged by failure. He had failed as a
dramatist, and as a writer of romance; he had been discharged from the
public service under a cloud, and his imprisonment would not recommend
him to the Philistines. Highly respectable literary persons closed
their doors to him, and in these circumstances Lope’s companionship
would be most welcome. From these small details we may fairly infer
that _Don Quixote_ was not finished till the very end of 1602, and that
the final touches were not given till Cervantes went to Valladolid in
1603, a perfectly insignificant figure in the eyes of literary men and
literary patrons. He was still nothing but a seedy elderly hack when
_Don Quixote_ was licensed in September 1604. The book stole into the
market at the beginning of 1605, with no great expectation of success
on the part of the publisher who had it printed in a commonplace,
careless fashion, and left it to take its chance on his counter at the
price of eight and a half _reales_. We all know the result. From the
outset _Don Quixote_ was immensely popular, and from that day to this
the author’s reputation has steadily increased—till now he ranks as
one of the great immortals. The history of literature shows no more
enduring triumph.
Cervantes himself tells us that _Don Quixote_ is, ‘from beginning to
end, an attack upon the books of chivalry,’ and no doubt he means
this assertion to be taken literally. But, as I have said elsewhere,
the statement must be interpreted rationally in the light of other
facts. It is quite true that books of chivalry had been a public
pest, that grave scholars and theologians thundered against them, and
that legislation was invoked to prevent their introduction into the
blameless American colonies. The mystic Malón de Chaide, writing in
1588, declared that these extravagances were as dangerous as a knife in
a madman’s hand; but Malón de Chaide lived sequestered from the world,
and was evidently not aware that public taste had changed since he was
young. It is a significant fact that no romance of chivalry was printed
at Madrid during the reign of Philip II., and the natural conclusion
is that such publications were then popular only in country districts.
The previous twenty years of Cervantes’s life had been passed in the
provinces, and one might be tempted to imagine that he was unaware of
what was happening elsewhere. This would be an error: the fact that
he mentions his own _Rinconete y Cortadillo_ in _Don Quixote_ proves
that he knew there was a demand for picaresque stories, and that he
was prepared to satisfy it. The probability is that Cervantes, who
lived much in the past, had intended to write a short travesty of a
chivalresque novel, and that his original intention remained present
in his mind long after he had exceeded it in practice. If any one
chooses to insist that Cervantes gave the romances of chivalry their
death-blow, we are not concerned to deny it; if he had done nothing
more, it would have been an inglorious victory, for they were already
at the last extremity: but in truth, though he himself may have been
unconscious of it, in writing _Don Quixote_ Cervantes signalised the
triumph of the modern spirit over mediævalism.
He had set out impelled by the spirit of burlesque, and perhaps had
met in his wanderings on the King’s commission some quaint belated
personage who seemed a survival from a picturesque, idealistic age,
and who invited good-natured caricature. With some such intention,
Cervantes began a tale, which, so far as he could foresee, would be no
longer than some of his _Exemplary Novels_ (of which one, at least,
was already written); but the experiment was a new one, and the author
himself was at the mercy of accidents. He saw little more than the
possibilities of his central idea: a country gentleman who had become
a monomaniac by incessant pondering over fabulous deeds, and who was
led into ridiculous situations by attempting to imitate the imaginary
exploits of his mythical heroes. Cervantes sets forth light-heartedly;
pictures his gaunt hero arguing with Master Nicolás, the village
barber, over the relative merits of Palmerín and Amadís; and finally
presents him aflame with an enthusiasm which drives him to furbish up
his great-grandfather’s armour, to go out to right every kind of wrong,
and to win everlasting renown (as well as the empire of Trebizond).
Parodies, burlesque allusions, humorous parallels crowd upon the
writer, and his pen flies trippingly along till he reaches the third
chapter. At this point Cervantes perceives the subject broadening out,
and the landlord accordingly impresses on Don Quixote the necessity of
providing himself with a squire.
It is a momentous passage: there and then the image of Sancho Panza
first flashed into the author’s mind, but not with any definition of
outline. Cervantes does not venture to introduce Sancho Panza in person
till near the end of the seventh chapter, and he is visibly ill at ease
over his new creation. It is quite plain that, at this stage, Cervantes
knew very little about Sancho Panza, and his first remark is that the
squire was an honest man (if any poor man can be called honest), ‘but
with very little sense in his pate.’ This is not the Sancho who has
survived: honesty is not the most pre-eminent quality of the squire,
and if anybody thinks Sancho Panza a born fool he must have a high
standard of ability. In the ninth chapter Cervantes goes out of his
way to describe Sancho Panza as a long-legged man: obviously, up to
this point, he had never seen the squire at close quarters, and was as
yet not nearly so well acquainted with him as you and I are. He was
soon to know him more intimately. Perceiving his mistake, he hustled
the long-legged scarecrow out of sight, observed the real Sancho with
minute fidelity, and created the most richly humorous character in
modern literature. The only possible rival to Sancho Panza is Sir John
Falstaff; but Falstaff is emphatically English, whereas Sancho Panza is
a citizen of the world, stamped with the seal of universality.
It can scarcely be doubted that _Don Quixote_ contains many allusions
to contemporaries and contemporary events. We can catch the point of
his jests at Lope de Vega’s fondness for a classical reference, or at a
geographical blunder made by the learned Mariana; but probably many an
allusion of the same kind escapes us in Cervantes’s pages. The same may
be said of Shakespeare, and hence both Cervantes and Shakespeare have
been much exposed to the attentions of commentators. In a celebrated
passage of _A Midsummer-Night’s Dream_ Oberon addresses Puck:—
Thou rememberest
Since once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
That the rude sea grew civil at her song
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To hear the sea-maid’s music.
An ordinary reader would be content to admire the lines as they stand,
but a commentator is an extraordinary reader, who feels compelled to
justify his existence by identifying the mermaid with Mary Queen of
Scots, the dolphin with her first husband the Dauphin of France, and
the certain stars with Mary’s English partisans. In precisely the same
way Don Quixote has been identified with the Duke of Lerma, Sancho
Panza with Pedro Franqueza, and the three ass-colts—promised by the
knight to the squire as some compensation for the loss of Dapple—have
been flatteringly recognised as the three Princes of Savoy, Philip,
Victor Amadeus, and Emmanuel Philibert. These identifications seem
quite as likely to be correct in the one case as in the other. We need
not discuss them. But if _A Midsummer-Night’s Dream_ and _Don Quixote_
were really intended as a couple of political pasquinades, they must be
classed as complete failures: the idea that Cervantes and Shakespeare
were a pair of party pamphleteers is a piece of grotesque perversity.
Apart from the matter of _Don Quixote_, the diversity of its manner
is arresting. Even those who most admire the elaborate diction of the
_Galatea_ are compelled to admit its monotony. The variety of incident
in _Don Quixote_ corresponds to a variety of style which is a new
thing in Spanish literature. Still there are examples of deliberate
imitation, not only in the travesties of the romances of chivalry, but
in such passages as Don Quixote’s famous declamation on the happier Age
of Gold:—
Happy the age, happy the time, to which the ancients
gave the name of golden, not because in that fortunate
age the gold so coveted in this our iron one was gained
without labour, but because they that lived in it knew
not the two words ‘mine’ and ‘thine.’ In that blessed age
all things were in common; to win the daily food no toil
was needed from any man but to stretch out his hand and
pluck it from the mighty oaks that stood there generously
inviting him with their sweet ripe fruit. The crystal
streams and rippling brooks yielded their clear and
grateful waters in splendid profusion. The busy and wise
bees set up their commonwealth in the clefts of the rocks
and the hollows of the trees, offering without usance
to every hand the abundant produce of their fragrant
toil.... Fraud, deceit, or malice had not as yet tainted
truth and sincerity. Justice held her own, untroubled and
unassailed by the attempts of favour and interest, which
so greatly damage, corrupt, and encompass her about....
And so forth. It is a fine piece of embroidered rhetoric, which is
fairly entitled to the place it holds in most anthologies of Spanish
prose. But it is not specially characteristic of Cervantes: it is a
brilliant passage introduced to prove that the writer could, if he
chose, rival Antonio de Guevara as a virtuoso in what is thought the
grand style. Nor is Cervantes himself in the points and conceits which
abound in Marcela’s address to Ambrosio and the assembled friends of
the dead shepherd Chrysostom:—
By that natural understanding which God has given me
I know that everything beautiful attracts love, but I
cannot see how, by reason of being loved, that which is
loved for its beauty is bound to love that which loves
it.... As there is an infinity of beautiful objects there
must be an infinity of inclinations, and true love (so I
have heard it said) is indivisible, and must be voluntary
and uncompelled.... I was born free, and that I might
live in freedom I chose the solitude of the fields; in
the trees of the mountains I find society, the clear
waters of the brooks are my mirrors, and to the trees and
waters I make known my thoughts and charms. I am a fire
afar off, a sword laid aside.... Let him who calls me
wild beast and basilisk leave me alone as a thing noxious
and evil.
To the mind of an English reader, this passage recalls the recondite
preciosity of Juliet:—
Hath Romeo slain himself? say thou but ‘I,’
And that bare vowel, ‘I,’ shall poison more
Than the death-darting eye of cockatrice:
I am not I, if there be such an I,
Or those eyes shut, that make thee answer ‘I.’
These exhibitions of verbal ingenuity are a blemish in the early
chapters of _Don Quixote_ and in _Romeo and Juliet_. At this stage of
their development both Cervantes and Shakespeare were struggling to
disengage their genius from the clutch of contemporary affectation, and
both succeeded. As _Don Quixote_ progresses the parody of the books
of chivalry becomes less insistent, the style grows more supple and
adaptable, reaches a high level of restrained eloquence in the knight’s
speeches, is forcible and familiar in expressing the squire’s artful
simplicity, is invariably appropriate in the mouths of men differing so
widely from each other as Vivaldo and the Barber, Ginés de Pasamonte
and Cardenio, Don Fernando and the left-handed landlord, the Captive
and the village priest. The dramatic fitness of the dialogue in _Don
Quixote_, its intense life and speedy movement are striking innovations
in the development of the Spanish novel, and give the book its abiding
air of modernity. Cervantes had discovered the great secret that truth
is a more essential element of artistic beauty than all the academic
elegance in the world.
But the immediate triumph of _Don Quixote_ was not due—or, at
least, was not mainly due—to strictly artistic qualities. These
make an irresistible appeal to us, who belong to a more analytic
and sophisticated generation. To contemporary readers the charm of
_Don Quixote_ lay in its amalgamation of imaginative and realistic
elements, in its accumulated episodes, in its infinite sympathy, and
its pervasive humour. There was no question then as to whether _Don
Quixote_ was a well of symbolic doctrine. The canvas was crowded with
types familiar to every one who had eyes to see his companions on
the dusty highways of Spain. The wenches who served Don Quixote with
stockfish and black bread; the lad Andrés, flayed in the grove of oaks
by Juan Haldudo the Rich, of Quintanar; the goatherds seated round
the fire on which the pot of salted goat was simmering; the three
lively needle-makers from the Colt of Córdoba; the midnight procession
escorting the dead body from Baeza to Segovia, and chanting dirges
on the road; the dozen galley-slaves tramping on, strung together
like beads on an iron chain—all these are observed and presented with
masterly precision of detail. But the really triumphant creations of
the book are, of course, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza—the impassioned
idealist and the incarnation of gross common-sense. They were instantly
accepted as great representative figures; the adventures of the
fearless Manchegan madman and his timorous practical squire were
speedily reprinted in the capital and the provinces; and within six
months a writer in Valladolid assumed as a matter of course that his
correspondent in the Portuguese Indies must have made the acquaintance
of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
One of the most attractive characteristics of _Don Quixote_ is its
maturity; it may not have taken more than three or four years to
write, but it embodies the experience of a lifetime, and it breathes
an air of urbanity and leisure. Cervantes was not an exceptionally
rapid writer, and—if he thought about the matter at all—probably knew
that masterpieces are seldom produced in a hurry. His great rival Lope
de Vega easily surpassed him in brilliant facility: Cervantes’s mind
was weightier, less fleet but more precise. In the closing sentences
of _Don Quixote_ he had half promised a continuation, and no doubt
it occupied his thoughts for many years. He had set himself a most
formidable task—the task of equalling himself at his best—and he may
well have shrunk from it, for he was risking his hard-won reputation
on a doubtful hazard. He was in no haste to put his fortune to the
touch. He sank into a pregnant silence, pondered over the technique
of his great design, and, with the exception of an occasional sonnet,
published nothing for eight years. At last in 1613 he issued his
_Novelas Exemplares_, twelve short stories, the composition of which
was spread over a long space of time. One of these, _Rinconete y
Cortadillo_, is mentioned in _Don Quixote_, and must therefore date
from 1602 or earlier; a companion story, the _Coloquio de los Perros_,
is assigned to 1608; and the remaining ten are plausibly believed to
have been written between these dates. The two tales just mentioned
are the gems of the collection, but _La Gitanilla_ and _El Celoso
extremeño_ are scarcely less striking, and certainly seven out of
the dozen are models of realistic art. Cervantes was never troubled
by mock-modesty, and ingenuously asserts that he was ‘the first to
attempt novels in the Castilian tongue, for the many which wander
about in print in Spanish are all translated from foreign languages,
while these are my own, neither imitated nor stolen.’ There were
earlier collections of stories (from one of which—Eslava’s _Noches
de Invierno_—Shakespeare contrived to borrow the plot of _The
Tempest_), but they are eclipsed by the _Novelas Exemplares_. These, in
their turn, are overshadowed by _Don Quixote_, but they would suffice
to make the reputation of any novelist by their fine invention and
engaging fusion of truth with fantasy. The harshest of native critics
yielded to the spell, and the _Novelas Exemplares_ were skilfully
exploited by John Fletcher and by Middleton and Rowley in England, as
well as by Hardy in France.
Cervantes had now so unquestionably succeeded in prose that he was
tempted to bid for fame as a poet. He mistrusted his own powers, and,
as the event proved, with reason. His _Viage del Parnaso_, published
in 1614, commemorated the most prominent versifiers of the day in a
spirit of mingled appreciation and satirical criticism. It is very
doubtful whether there have been so many great poets in the history of
the world as Cervantes descried among his Spanish contemporaries, and
his compliments are too effusive and too universal to be effective. A
noble amateur, a potential patron, is lauded as extravagantly as though
he were the equal of Lope or Góngora, and the occasional excursions
into satire are mostly pointless. There are more wit, and pungency,
and concentrated force in any two pages of _English Bards and Scotch
Reviewers_ than in all the cantos of the _Viage del Parnaso_ put
together. It cannot be merely owing to temperamental differences that
Byron succeeds where Cervantes fails. There are splenetic passages in
the _Viage_ relating to such writers as Bernardo de la Vega and the
author of _La Pícara Justina_, but they miss their mark. The simple
truth is—not that Cervantes was willing to wound and yet afraid to
strike, but—that he had no complete mastery of his instrument.
His instinct was right; he moves uneasily in the fetters of verse, and
only becomes himself in the prose appendix to the _Viage_ which (as the
internal evidence discloses) was written side by side with the Second
Part of _Don Quixote_. His true vehicle was prose, but he was reluctant
to abide by the limitations of his genius, and while the sequel to _Don
Quixote_ was maturing, he produced a volume of plays containing eight
formal full-dress dramas and eight sparkling interludes. By sympathy
and by training Cervantes belonged to the older school of dramatists,
and his attempts to rival Lope de Vega on Lope’s own ground are mostly
embarrassed and, in some cases, curiously maladroit; yet he displays
a happy malicious humour in the less ambitious interludes, and, when
he betakes himself to prose, he captivates by the spontaneous wit
and nimble gaiety of his dialogue. These thumbnail sketches, like
the kit-cats of the _Novelas Exemplares_, may be regarded as so many
studies for the Second Part of _Don Quixote_, at which Cervantes was
still working.
This tardy sequel, which followed the First Part at an interval of
ten years, might never have seen the light but for the publication of
Avellaneda’s apocryphal _Don Quixote_ with its blustering and malignant
preface. Cervantes’s gentle spirit survived unembittered by a heavy
burden of trials and humiliations; but the proud humility with which
(in the preface to his Second Part) he meets Avellaneda’s attack shows
how profoundly he resented it. It would have been well had he preserved
this attitude in the text. He was taken by surprise and, goaded out
of patience, flung his other work aside, and brought _Don Quixote_
to a hurried close. Was Avellaneda’s insolent intrusion a blessing
in disguise, or was it disastrous in effect? It is true that but for
Avellaneda we might have lost the true sequel as we have lost the
Second Part of the _Galatea_, the _Semanas del Jardin_, and the rest.
It is no less true that, but for Avellaneda, the sequel might have been
even better than it actually is. Cervantes had steadily refused to be
hurried over his masterpiece, and, so long as he followed his own bent,
his work is almost flawless. But Avellaneda suddenly forced him to
quicken his step, and in the last chapters Cervantes manifestly writes
in furious haste. His art suffers in consequence. His bland amenity
deserts him; his eyes wander restlessly from Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza to Avellaneda, whom he belabours out of season. He allows himself
to be out-generalled, recasting his plan because his foe had stolen
it—as though the plan and not the execution were the main essential!
He advances, halts, and harks back, uncertain as to his object; he
introduces irrelevant personalities and at least one cynical trait
unworthy of him. Obviously he is anxious to have the book off his
hands, so as to bring confusion on Avellaneda.
That these are blemishes it would be futile to deny; but how
insignificant they are beside the positive qualities of the Second
Part! Unlike some of his admirers, Cervantes was not above profiting
by criticism. He tells us that objection had been taken to the
intercalated stories of the First Part, and to some scenes of exuberant
fun bordering on horse-play. These faults are avoided in the sequel,
which broadens out till it assumes a truly epical grandeur. The
development of the two central characters is at once more logical and
more poetic; Don Quixote awakens less laughter, and more thought, while
Sancho Panza’s store of apophthegms and immemorial wisdom is more
inexhaustible and apposite than ever. Lastly, the new personages, from
the Duchess downwards to Doctor Pedro Recio de Agüero—the ill-omened
physician of Barataria—are marvels of realistic portraiture. The
presentation of the crazy knight and the droll squire expands into
a splendid pageant of society. And, as one reads the less elaborate
passages, one acquires the conviction that the very dust of Cervantes’s
writings is gold. The Second Part of _Don Quixote_ was the last of
his works that he saw in print. His career was over, and it closed in
splendour. His battle was fought and won, and he died, as befits a
hero, with the trumpets of victory ringing in his ears.
His labyrinthine romance, _Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda_,
appeared in 1617. Even had this posthumous work been, as Cervantes
half hoped, ‘the best book of its kind,’ it could scarcely have added
to his glory. Though distinctly not the best book of its kind, the
great name on its title-page procured it a respectful reception, and
it was repeatedly reprinted within a short time of its publication.
But it was soon lost in the vast shadow of _Don Quixote_: no one need
feel guilty because he has not read it. The world, leaving scholars
and professional critics to estimate the writer’s indebtedness to
Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius, has steadily refused to be interested
in _Persiles y Sigismunda_; and in the long run the world delivers
a just judgment. It is often led astray by gossip, by influence, by
publishers’ tricks, by authors who press their own wares on you with
all the effrontery of a cheap-jack at a fair; but the world finds
out the truth at last. An author’s genius may be manifest in most or
all of his works; but it is wont to be conspicuous in one above the
rest. Shakespeare wrote _Hamlet_: one _Hamlet_. Cervantes wrote _Don
Quixote_—two _Don Quixotes_: a feat unparalleled in the history of
literature. The one is the foremost of dramatists, and the other the
foremost of romancers: and it is to a single masterpiece that each owes
the greater part of his transcendent fame.