The History of Don Quixote, Vol. I., Part 1. - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Both brothers founded families. The Cervantes branch had more tenacity;
it sent offshoots in various directions, Andalusia, Estremadura, Galicia,
and Portugal, and produced a goodly line of men distinguished in the
service of Church and State. Gonzalo himself, and apparently a son of
his, followed Ferdinand III in the great campaign of 1236-48 that gave
Cordova and Seville to Christian Spain and penned up the Moors in the
kingdom of Granada, and his descendants intermarried with some of the
noblest families of the Peninsula and numbered among them soldiers,
magistrates, and Church dignitaries, including at least two
cardinal-archbishops.
Of the line that settled in Andalusia, Deigo de Cervantes, Commander of
the Order of Santiago, married Juana Avellaneda, daughter of Juan Arias
de Saavedra, and had several sons, of whom one was Gonzalo Gomez,
Corregidor of Jerez and ancestor of the Mexican and Columbian branches of
the family; and another, Juan, whose son Rodrigo married Dona Leonor de
Cortinas, and by her had four children, Rodrigo, Andrea, Luisa, and
Miguel, our author.
The pedigree of Cervantes is not without its bearing on "Don Quixote." A
man who could look back upon an ancestry of genuine knights-errant
extending from well-nigh the time of Pelayo to the siege of Granada was
likely to have a strong feeling on the subject of the sham chivalry of
the romances. It gives a point, too, to what he says in more than one
place about families that have once been great and have tapered away
until they have come to nothing, like a pyramid. It was the case of his
own.
He was born at Alcala de Henares and baptised in the church of Santa
Maria Mayor on the 9th of October, 1547. Of his boyhood and youth we know
nothing, unless it be from the glimpse he gives us in the preface to his
"Comedies" of himself as a boy looking on with delight while Lope de
Rueda and his company set up their rude plank stage in the plaza and
acted the rustic farces which he himself afterwards took as the model of
his interludes. This first glimpse, however, is a significant one, for it
shows the early development of that love of the drama which exercised
such an influence on his life and seems to have grown stronger as he grew
older, and of which this very preface, written only a few months before
his death, is such a striking proof. He gives us to understand, too, that
he was a great reader in his youth; but of this no assurance was needed,
for the First Part of "Don Quixote" alone proves a vast amount of
miscellaneous reading, romances of chivalry, ballads, popular poetry,
chronicles, for which he had no time or opportunity except in the first
twenty years of his life; and his misquotations and mistakes in matters
of detail are always, it may be noticed, those of a man recalling the
reading of his boyhood.
Other things besides the drama were in their infancy when Cervantes was a
boy. The period of his boyhood was in every way a transition period for
Spain. The old chivalrous Spain had passed away. The new Spain was the
mightiest power the world had seen since the Roman Empire and it had not
yet been called upon to pay the price of its greatness. By the policy of
Ferdinand and Ximenez the sovereign had been made absolute, and the
Church and Inquisition adroitly adjusted to keep him so. The nobles, who
had always resisted absolutism as strenuously as they had fought the
Moors, had been divested of all political power, a like fate had befallen
the cities, the free constitutions of Castile and Aragon had been swept
away, and the only function that remained to the Cortes was that of
granting money at the King's dictation.
The transition extended to literature. Men who, like Garcilaso de la Vega
and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, followed the Italian wars, had brought back
from Italy the products of the post-Renaissance literature, which took
root and flourished and even threatened to extinguish the native growths.
Damon and Thyrsis, Phyllis and Chloe had been fairly naturalised in
Spain, together with all the devices of pastoral poetry for investing
with an air of novelty the idea of a dispairing shepherd and inflexible
shepherdess. As a set-off against this, the old historical and
traditional ballads, and the true pastorals, the songs and ballads of
peasant life, were being collected assiduously and printed in the
cancioneros that succeeded one another with increasing rapidity. But the
most notable consequence, perhaps, of the spread of printing was the
flood of romances of chivalry that had continued to pour from the press
ever since Garci Ordonez de Montalvo had resuscitated "Amadis of Gaul" at
the beginning of the century.
For a youth fond of reading, solid or light, there could have been no
better spot in Spain than Alcala de Henares in the middle of the
sixteenth century. It was then a busy, populous university town,
something more than the enterprising rival of Salamanca, and altogether a
very different place from the melancholy, silent, deserted Alcala the
traveller sees now as he goes from Madrid to Saragossa. Theology and
medicine may have been the strong points of the university, but the town
itself seems to have inclined rather to the humanities and light
literature, and as a producer of books Alcala was already beginning to
compete with the older presses of Toledo, Burgos, Salamanca and Seville.
A pendant to the picture Cervantes has given us of his first playgoings
might, no doubt, have been often seen in the streets of Alcala at that
time; a bright, eager, tawny-haired boy peering into a book-shop where
the latest volumes lay open to tempt the public, wondering, it may be,
what that little book with the woodcut of the blind beggar and his boy,
that called itself "Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, segunda impresion,"
could be about; or with eyes brimming over with merriment gazing at one
of those preposterous portraits of a knight-errant in outrageous panoply
and plumes with which the publishers of chivalry romances loved to
embellish the title-pages of their folios. If the boy was the father of
the man, the sense of the incongruous that was strong at fifty was lively
at ten, and some such reflections as these may have been the true genesis
of "Don Quixote."
For his more solid education, we are told, he went to Salamanca. But why
Rodrigo de Cervantes, who was very poor, should have sent his son to a
university a hundred and fifty miles away when he had one at his own
door, would be a puzzle, if we had any reason for supposing that he did
so. The only evidence is a vague statement by Professor Tomas Gonzalez,
that he once saw an old entry of the matriculation of a Miguel de
Cervantes. This does not appear to have been ever seen again; but even if
it had, and if the date corresponded, it would prove nothing, as there
were at least two other Miguels born about the middle of the century; one
of them, moreover, a Cervantes Saavedra, a cousin, no doubt, who was a
source of great embarrassment to the biographers.
That he was a student neither at Salamanca nor at Alcala is best proved
by his own works. No man drew more largely upon experience than he did,
and he has nowhere left a single reminiscence of student life-for the
"Tia Fingida," if it be his, is not one--nothing, not even "a college
joke," to show that he remembered days that most men remember best. All
that we know positively about his education is that Juan Lopez de Hoyos,
a professor of humanities and belles-lettres of some eminence, calls him
his "dear and beloved pupil." This was in a little collection of verses
by different hands on the death of Isabel de Valois, second queen of
Philip II, published by the professor in 1569, to which Cervantes
contributed four pieces, including an elegy, and an epitaph in the form
of a sonnet. It is only by a rare chance that a "Lycidas" finds its way
into a volume of this sort, and Cervantes was no Milton. His verses are
no worse than such things usually are; so much, at least, may be said for
them.
By the time the book appeared he had left Spain, and, as fate ordered it,
for twelve years, the most eventful ones of his life. Giulio, afterwards
Cardinal, Acquaviva had been sent at the end of 1568 to Philip II by the
Pope on a mission, partly of condolence, partly political, and on his
return to Rome, which was somewhat brusquely expedited by the King, he
took Cervantes with him as his camarero (chamberlain), the office he
himself held in the Pope's household. The post would no doubt have led to
advancement at the Papal Court had Cervantes retained it, but in the
summer of 1570 he resigned it and enlisted as a private soldier in
Captain Diego Urbina's company, belonging to Don Miguel de Moncada's
regiment, but at that time forming a part of the command of Marc Antony
Colonna. What impelled him to this step we know not, whether it was
distaste for the career before him, or purely military enthusiasm. It may
well have been the latter, for it was a stirring time; the events,
however, which led to the alliance between Spain, Venice, and the Pope,
against the common enemy, the Porte, and to the victory of the combined
fleets at Lepanto, belong rather to the history of Europe than to the
life of Cervantes. He was one of those that sailed from Messina, in
September 1571, under the command of Don John of Austria; but on the
morning of the 7th of October, when the Turkish fleet was sighted, he was
lying below ill with fever. At the news that the enemy was in sight he
rose, and, in spite of the remonstrances of his comrades and superiors,
insisted on taking his post, saying he preferred death in the service of
God and the King to health. His galley, the Marquesa, was in the thick of
the fight, and before it was over he had received three gunshot wounds,
two in the breast and one in the left hand or arm. On the morning after
the battle, according to Navarrete, he had an interview with the
commander-in-chief, Don John, who was making a personal inspection of the
wounded, one result of which was an addition of three crowns to his pay,
and another, apparently, the friendship of his general.
How severely Cervantes was wounded may be inferred from the fact, that
with youth, a vigorous frame, and as cheerful and buoyant a temperament
as ever invalid had, he was seven months in hospital at Messina before he
was discharged. He came out with his left hand permanently disabled; he
had lost the use of it, as Mercury told him in the "Viaje del Parnaso"
for the greater glory of the right. This, however, did not absolutely
unfit him for service, and in April 1572 he joined Manuel Ponce de Leon's
company of Lope de Figueroa's regiment, in which, it seems probable, his
brother Rodrigo was serving, and shared in the operations of the next
three years, including the capture of the Goletta and Tunis. Taking
advantage of the lull which followed the recapture of these places by the
Turks, he obtained leave to return to Spain, and sailed from Naples in
September 1575 on board the Sun galley, in company with his brother
Rodrigo, Pedro Carrillo de Quesada, late Governor of the Goletta, and
some others, and furnished with letters from Don John of Austria and the
Duke of Sesa, the Viceroy of Sicily, recommending him to the King for the
command of a company, on account of his services; a dono infelice as
events proved. On the 26th they fell in with a squadron of Algerine
galleys, and after a stout resistance were overpowered and carried into
Algiers.
By means of a ransomed fellow-captive the brothers contrived to inform
their family of their condition, and the poor people at Alcala at once
strove to raise the ransom money, the father disposing of all he
possessed, and the two sisters giving up their marriage portions. But
Dali Mami had found on Cervantes the letters addressed to the King by Don
John and the Duke of Sesa, and, concluding that his prize must be a
person of great consequence, when the money came he refused it scornfully
as being altogether insufficient. The owner of Rodrigo, however, was more
easily satisfied; ransom was accepted in his case, and it was arranged
between the brothers that he should return to Spain and procure a vessel
in which he was to come back to Algiers and take off Miguel and as many
of their comrades as possible. This was not the first attempt to escape
that Cervantes had made. Soon after the commencement of his captivity he
induced several of his companions to join him in trying to reach Oran,
then a Spanish post, on foot; but after the first day's journey, the Moor
who had agreed to act as their guide deserted them, and they had no
choice but to return. The second attempt was more disastrous. In a garden
outside the city on the sea-shore, he constructed, with the help of the
gardener, a Spaniard, a hiding-place, to which he brought, one by one,
fourteen of his fellow-captives, keeping them there in secrecy for
several months, and supplying them with food through a renegade known as
El Dorador, "the Gilder." How he, a captive himself, contrived to do all
this, is one of the mysteries of the story. Wild as the project may
appear, it was very nearly successful. The vessel procured by Rodrigo
made its appearance off the coast, and under cover of night was
proceeding to take off the refugees, when the crew were alarmed by a
passing fishing boat, and beat a hasty retreat. On renewing the attempt
shortly afterwards, they, or a portion of them at least, were taken
prisoners, and just as the poor fellows in the garden were exulting in
the thought that in a few moments more freedom would be within their
grasp, they found themselves surrounded by Turkish troops, horse and
foot. The Dorador had revealed the whole scheme to the Dey Hassan.
When Cervantes saw what had befallen them, he charged his companions to
lay all the blame upon him, and as they were being bound he declared
aloud that the whole plot was of his contriving, and that nobody else had
any share in it. Brought before the Dey, he said the same. He was
threatened with impalement and with torture; and as cutting off ears and
noses were playful freaks with the Algerines, it may be conceived what
their tortures were like; but nothing could make him swerve from his
original statement that he and he alone was responsible. The upshot was
that the unhappy gardener was hanged by his master, and the prisoners
taken possession of by the Dey, who, however, afterwards restored most of
them to their masters, but kept Cervantes, paying Dali Mami 500 crowns
for him. He felt, no doubt, that a man of such resource, energy, and
daring, was too dangerous a piece of property to be left in private
hands; and he had him heavily ironed and lodged in his own prison. If he
thought that by these means he could break the spirit or shake the
resolution of his prisoner, he was soon undeceived, for Cervantes
contrived before long to despatch a letter to the Governor of Oran,
entreating him to send him some one that could be trusted, to enable him
and three other gentlemen, fellow-captives of his, to make their escape;
intending evidently to renew his first attempt with a more trustworthy
guide. Unfortunately the Moor who carried the letter was stopped just
outside Oran, and the letter being found upon him, he was sent back to
Algiers, where by the order of the Dey he was promptly impaled as a
warning to others, while Cervantes was condemned to receive two thousand
blows of the stick, a number which most likely would have deprived the
world of "Don Quixote," had not some persons, who they were we know not,
interceded on his behalf.
After this he seems to have been kept in still closer confinement than
before, for nearly two years passed before he made another attempt. This
time his plan was to purchase, by the aid of a Spanish renegade and two
Valencian merchants resident in Algiers, an armed vessel in which he and
about sixty of the leading captives were to make their escape; but just
as they were about to put it into execution one Doctor Juan Blanco de
Paz, an ecclesiastic and a compatriot, informed the Dey of the plot.
Cervantes by force of character, by his self-devotion, by his untiring
energy and his exertions to lighten the lot of his companions in misery,
had endeared himself to all, and become the leading spirit in the captive
colony, and, incredible as it may seem, jealousy of his influence and the
esteem in which he was held, moved this man to compass his destruction by
a cruel death. The merchants finding that the Dey knew all, and fearing
that Cervantes under torture might make disclosures that would imperil
their own lives, tried to persuade him to slip away on board a vessel
that was on the point of sailing for Spain; but he told them they had
nothing to fear, for no tortures would make him compromise anybody, and
he went at once and gave himself up to the Dey.
As before, the Dey tried to force him to name his accomplices. Everything
was made ready for his immediate execution; the halter was put round his
neck and his hands tied behind him, but all that could be got from him
was that he himself, with the help of four gentlemen who had since left
Algiers, had arranged the whole, and that the sixty who were to accompany
him were not to know anything of it until the last moment. Finding he
could make nothing of him, the Dey sent him back to prison more heavily
ironed than before.
The poverty-stricken Cervantes family had been all this time trying once
more to raise the ransom money, and at last a sum of three hundred ducats
was got together and entrusted to the Redemptorist Father Juan Gil, who
was about to sail for Algiers. The Dey, however, demanded more than
double the sum offered, and as his term of office had expired and he was
about to sail for Constantinople, taking all his slaves with him, the
case of Cervantes was critical. He was already on board heavily ironed,
when the Dey at length agreed to reduce his demand by one-half, and
Father Gil by borrowing was able to make up the amount, and on September
19, 1580, after a captivity of five years all but a week, Cervantes was
at last set free. Before long he discovered that Blanco de Paz, who
claimed to be an officer of the Inquisition, was now concocting on false
evidence a charge of misconduct to be brought against him on his return
to Spain. To checkmate him Cervantes drew up a series of twenty-five
questions, covering the whole period of his captivity, upon which he
requested Father Gil to take the depositions of credible witnesses before
a notary. Eleven witnesses taken from among the principal captives in
Algiers deposed to all the facts above stated and to a great deal more
besides. There is something touching in the admiration, love, and
gratitude we see struggling to find expression in the formal language of
the notary, as they testify one after another to the good deeds of
Cervantes, how he comforted and helped the weak-hearted, how he kept up
their drooping courage, how he shared his poor purse with this deponent,
and how "in him this deponent found father and mother."
On his return to Spain he found his old regiment about to march for
Portugal to support Philip's claim to the crown, and utterly penniless
now, had no choice but to rejoin it. He was in the expeditions to the
Azores in 1582 and the following year, and on the conclusion of the war
returned to Spain in the autumn of 1583, bringing with him the manuscript
of his pastoral romance, the "Galatea," and probably also, to judge by
internal evidence, that of the first portion of "Persiles and
Sigismunda." He also brought back with him, his biographers assert, an
infant daughter, the offspring of an amour, as some of them with great
circumstantiality inform us, with a Lisbon lady of noble birth, whose
name, however, as well as that of the street she lived in, they omit to
mention. The sole foundation for all this is that in 1605 there certainly
was living in the family of Cervantes a Dona Isabel de Saavedra, who is
described in an official document as his natural daughter, and then
twenty years of age.
With his crippled left hand promotion in the army was hopeless, now that
Don John was dead and he had no one to press his claims and services, and
for a man drawing on to forty life in the ranks was a dismal prospect; he
had already a certain reputation as a poet; he made up his mind,
therefore, to cast his lot with literature, and for a first venture
committed his "Galatea" to the press. It was published, as Salva y Mallen
shows conclusively, at Alcala, his own birth-place, in 1585 and no doubt
helped to make his name more widely known, but certainly did not do him
much good in any other way.
While it was going through the press, he married Dona Catalina de
Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano, a lady of Esquivias near Madrid, and
apparently a friend of the family, who brought him a fortune which may
possibly have served to keep the wolf from the door, but if so, that was
all. The drama had by this time outgrown market-place stages and
strolling companies, and with his old love for it he naturally turned to
it for a congenial employment. In about three years he wrote twenty or
thirty plays, which he tells us were performed without any throwing of
cucumbers or other missiles, and ran their course without any hisses,
outcries, or disturbance. In other words, his plays were not bad enough
to be hissed off the stage, but not good enough to hold their own upon
it. Only two of them have been preserved, but as they happen to be two of
the seven or eight he mentions with complacency, we may assume they are
favourable specimens, and no one who reads the "Numancia" and the "Trato
de Argel" will feel any surprise that they failed as acting dramas.
Whatever merits they may have, whatever occasional they may show, they
are, as regards construction, incurably clumsy. How completely they
failed is manifest from the fact that with all his sanguine temperament
and indomitable perseverance he was unable to maintain the struggle to
gain a livelihood as a dramatist for more than three years; nor was the
rising popularity of Lope the cause, as is often said, notwithstanding
his own words to the contrary. When Lope began to write for the stage is
uncertain, but it was certainly after Cervantes went to Seville.
Among the "Nuevos Documentos" printed by Senor Asensio y Toledo is one
dated 1592, and curiously characteristic of Cervantes. It is an agreement
with one Rodrigo Osorio, a manager, who was to accept six comedies at
fifty ducats (about 6l.) apiece, not to be paid in any case unless it
appeared on representation that the said comedy was one of the best that
had ever been represented in Spain. The test does not seem to have been
ever applied; perhaps it was sufficiently apparent to Rodrigo Osorio that
the comedies were not among the best that had ever been represented.
Among the correspondence of Cervantes there might have been found, no
doubt, more than one letter like that we see in the "Rake's Progress,"
"Sir, I have read your play, and it will not doo."
He was more successful in a literary contest at Saragossa in 1595 in
honour of the canonisation of St. Jacinto, when his composition won the
first prize, three silver spoons. The year before this he had been
appointed a collector of revenues for the kingdom of Granada. In order to
remit the money he had collected more conveniently to the treasury, he
entrusted it to a merchant, who failed and absconded; and as the
bankrupt's assets were insufficient to cover the whole, he was sent to
prison at Seville in September 1597. The balance against him, however,
was a small one, about 26l., and on giving security for it he was
released at the end of the year.
It was as he journeyed from town to town collecting the king's taxes,
that he noted down those bits of inn and wayside life and character that
abound in the pages of "Don Quixote:" the Benedictine monks with
spectacles and sunshades, mounted on their tall mules; the strollers in
costume bound for the next village; the barber with his basin on his
head, on his way to bleed a patient; the recruit with his breeches in his
bundle, tramping along the road singing; the reapers gathered in the
venta gateway listening to "Felixmarte of Hircania" read out to them; and
those little Hogarthian touches that he so well knew how to bring in, the
ox-tail hanging up with the landlord's comb stuck in it, the wine-skins
at the bed-head, and those notable examples of hostelry art, Helen going
off in high spirits on Paris's arm, and Dido on the tower dropping tears
as big as walnuts. Nay, it may well be that on those journeys into remote
regions he came across now and then a specimen of the pauper gentleman,
with his lean hack and his greyhound and his books of chivalry, dreaming
away his life in happy ignorance that the world had changed since his
great-grandfather's old helmet was new. But it was in Seville that he
found out his true vocation, though he himself would not by any means
have admitted it to be so. It was there, in Triana, that he was first
tempted to try his hand at drawing from life, and first brought his
humour into play in the exquisite little sketch of "Rinconete y
Cortadillo," the germ, in more ways than one, of "Don Quixote."