Part II of the
Translator's
Preface for
Don Quixote
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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 15
83, 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
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 do."
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."
Where and when that was written, we cannot tell. After his imprisonment all trace of
Cervantes in his official capacity
disappears, from which it may be inferred that he was not reinstated. That he was still in Seville in November 1598
appears from a
satirical sonnet of his on the
elaborate catafalque erected to testify the grief of the city at the
death of
Philip II, but from this up to
1603 we have no clue to his movements. The words in the preface to the First Part of "
Don Quixote" are generally held to be conclusive that he conceived the idea of the book, and wrote the beginning of it at least, in a
prison, and that he may have done so is extremely
likely.
There is a
tradition that
Cervantes read some portions of his work to a select audience at the
Duke of Bejar's, which may have helped to make the book known; but the obvious conclusion is that the First Part of "
Don Quixote" lay on his hands some time before he could find a
publisher bold enough to undertake a venture of so novel a character; and so little faith in it had
Francisco Robles of
Madrid, to whom at last he sold it, that he did not care to incur the expense of securing the
copyright for
Aragon or
Portugal, contenting himself with that for
Castile. The printing was finished in
December, and the book came out with the new
year,
1605. It is often said that "
Don Quixote" was at first received coldly. The facts show just the contrary. No sooner was it in the hands of the public than preparations were made to issue
pirated editions at
Lisbon and
Valencia, and to bring out a second edition with the additional copyrights for
Aragon and
Portugal, which he secured in
February.
No doubt it was received with something more than coldness by certain sections of the community. Men of wit, taste, and discrimination among the aristocracy gave it a
hearty welcome, but the aristocracy in general were not likely to relish a book that turned their
favourite reading into
ridicule and laughed at so many of their
favourite ideas. The dramatists who gathered round Lope as their leader regarded
Cervantes as their common enemy, and it is plain that he was equally obnoxious to the other
clique, the
culto poets who had
Gongora for their chief.
Navarrete, who knew nothing of the
letter above mentioned, tries hard to show that the relations between
Cervantes and
Lope were of a very friendly sort, as indeed they were until "
Don Quixote" was written.
Cervantes, indeed, to the last generously and manfully declared his admiration of Lope's powers, his unfailing invention, and his marvellous fertility; but in the preface of the First Part of "
Don Quixote" and in the verses of "Urganda the Unknown," and one or two other places, there are, if we read between the lines, sly hits at Lope's
vanities and
affectations that
argue no
personal good-will; and
Lope openly sneers at "
Don Quixote" and
Cervantes, and fourteen
years after his
death gives him only a few lines of cold commonplace in the "
Laurel de Apolo," that seem all the
colder for the
eulogies of a host of
nonentities whose names are found nowhere else.
In 1601 Valladolid was made the seat of the
Court, and at the beginning of 1603
Cervantes had been summoned thither in connection with the balance due by him to the
Treasury, which was still outstanding. He remained at Valladolid, apparently supporting himself by agencies and scrivener's work of some sort; probably drafting petitions and drawing up statements of claims to be presented to the
Council, and the like. So, at least, we gather from the depositions taken on the occasion of the
death of a gentleman, the victim of a street brawl, who had been carried into the house in which he
lived. In these he himself is described as a
man who wrote and transacted business, and it
appears that his household then
consisted of his
wife, the
natural daughter
Isabel de Saavedra already mentioned, his sister Andrea, now a widow, her daughter
Constanza, a mysterious
Magdalena de Sotomayor calling herself his
sister, for whom his
biographers cannot account, and a
servant-maid.
Meanwhile "
Don Quixote" had been growing in favour, and its author's name was now known beyond the
Pyrenees. In
1607 an edition was printed at
Brussels. Robles, the
Madrid publisher, found it necessary to meet the demand by a third edition, the seventh in all, in
1608. The popularity of the book in
Italy was such that a
Milan bookseller was led to bring out an edition in
1610; and another was called for in
Brussels in
1611. It might naturally have been expected that, with such proofs before him that he had hit the taste of the
public,
Cervantes would have at once set about redeeming his rather vague promise of a second
volume.
But, to all
appearance, nothing was
farther from his thoughts. He had still by him one or two short tales of the same
vintage as those he had inserted in "
Don Quixote" and instead of continuing the adventures of
Don Quixote, he set to work to write more of these "
Novelas Exemplares" as he afterwards called them, with a view to making a book of them.
The novels were published in the summer of
1613, with a dedication to the
Conde de Lemos, the
Maecenas of the day, and with one of those chatty
confidential prefaces
Cervantes was so fond of. In this, eight
years and a half after the First Part of "
Don Quixote" had
appeared, we get the first hint of a forthcoming Second Part. "You shall see shortly," he says, "the further exploits of
Don Quixote and humours of
Sancho Panza." His idea of "shortly" was a somewhat elastic one, for, as we know by the date to Sancho's
letter, he had barely one-half of the book completed that time twelvemonth.
But more than
poems, or pastorals, or novels, it was his
dramatic ambition that engrossed his thoughts. The same indomitable
spirit that kept him from despair in the bagnios of
Algiers, and prompted him to attempt the
escape of himself and his comrades again and again, made him persevere in spite of
failure and discouragement in his efforts to win the
ear of the public as a
dramatist. The
temperament of
Cervantes was essentially
sanguine. The portrait he draws in the preface to the novels, with the
aquiline features,
chestnut hair, smooth
untroubled forehead, and bright
cheerful eyes, is the very
portrait of a
sanguine man. Nothing that the
managers might say could persuade him that the merits of his plays would not be recognised at last if they were only given a fair chance. The old soldier of the
Spanish Salamis was bent on being the
Aeschylus of
Spain. He was to found a great
national drama, based on the true principles of art, that was to be the envy of all
nations; he was to drive from the stage the silly,
childish plays, the "
mirrors of nonsense and
models of folly" that were in vogue through the cupidity of the
managers and
shortsightedness of the
authors; he was to correct and educate the public taste until it was ripe for tragedies on the model of the
Greek drama--like the "Numancia" for instance--and
comedies that would not only amuse but improve and instruct. All this he was to do, could he once get a
hearing: there was the initial
difficulty.
He shows plainly enough, too, that "
Don Quixote" and the demolition of the chivalry romances was not the work that lay next his
heart. He was, indeed, as he says himself in his preface, more a stepfather than a father to "
Don Quixote." Never was great work so neglected by its author. That it was written carelessly, hastily, and by fits and starts, was not always his
fault, but it seems
clear he never read what he sent to the
press. He knew how the printers had blundered, but he never took the trouble to correct them when the third edition was in progress, as a
man who really cared for the child of his brain would have done. He
appears to have regarded the book as little more than a mere
libro de
entretenimiento, an
amusing book, a thing, as he says in the "
Viaje," "to divert the
melancholy moody
heart at any time or season." No doubt he had an
affection for his hero, and was very
proud of
Sancho Panza. It would have been strange indeed if he had not been
proud of the most humorous creation in all fiction. He was proud, too, of the popularity and success of the book, and beyond measure
delightful is the
naivete with which he shows his pride in a dozen passages in the Second Part. But it was not the success he
coveted. In all probability he would have given all the success of "
Don Quixote," nay, would have seen every copy of "
Don Quixote" burned in the
Plaza Mayor, for one such success as
Lope de Vega was enjoying on an average once a week.
And so he went on, dawdling over "
Don Quixote," adding a chapter now and again, and putting it aside to turn to "
Persiles and Sigismunda"--which, as we know, was to be the most entertaining book in the language, and the rival of "
Theagenes and Chariclea"--or finishing off one of his darling comedies; and if
Robles asked when "
Don Quixote" would be ready, the answer
no doubt was:
En breve-shortly, there was time enough for that. At
sixty-eight he was as full of life and hope and plans for the future as a boy of eighteen.
Nemesis was coming, however. He had got as far as
Chapter LIX, which at his leisurely pace he could hardly have reached before October or November 1614, when there was put into his hand a small octave lately printed at
Tarragona, and calling itself "Second Volume of the
Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of
La Mancha: by the
Licentiate Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda of Tordesillas." The last half of Chapter LIX and most of the following chapters of the Second Part give us some idea of the effect produced upon him, and his
irritation was not likely to be lessened by the reflection that he had no one to blame but himself. Had
Avellaneda, in fact, been content with merely bringing out a continuation to "
Don Quixote,"
Cervantes would have had no reasonable
grievance. His own intentions were expressed in the very vaguest language at the end of the book; nay, in his last words, "
forse altro cantera con miglior plettro," he seems actually to invite some one else to continue the work, and he made no sign until eight
years and a half had gone by; by which time
Avellaneda's volume was no doubt written.
In fact
Cervantes had no case, or a very bad one, as far as the mere continuation was concerned. But
Avellaneda chose to write a preface to it, full of such coarse personal abuse as only an ill-
conditioned man could pour out. He taunts
Cervantes with being
old, with having lost his hand, with having been in
prison, with being
poor, with being
friendless, accuses him of
envy of Lope's success, of petulance and
querulousness, and so on; and it was in this that the sting lay.
Avellaneda's reason for this personal attack is obvious enough. Whoever he may have been, it is
clear that he was one of the dramatists of Lope's
school, for he has the impudence to charge
Cervantes with attacking him as well as Lope in his
criticism on the
drama. His
identification has exercised the best
critics and baffled all the
ingenuity and
research that has been brought to b
ear on it.
Navarrete and
Ticknor both incline to the belief that
Cervantes knew who he was; but I must say I think the anger he shows suggests an invisible
assailant; it is like the irritation of a
man stung by a mosquito in the dark.
Cervantes from certain solecisms of language pronounces him to be an
Aragonese, and
Pellicer, an
Aragonese himself, supports this view and believes him, moreover, to have been an ecclesiastic, a
Dominican probably.
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