CHAPTER IX. DON QUIXOTE. O torri, o celle, O donne, o cavalieri, O giardini, o palagi! a voi pensando Paraissez, Navarrois, Maures et Castillans, Le Cid, Act V. sc. i. THE last years of Cervantes' life were fruitful in artistic work. In his house in the Calle del Duque de Alba he corrected the proof-sheets of those Comedias y Entremeses to which an extended reference has been made in an earlier chapter. They were neglected by contemporaries; they have been deservedly condemned by the maturer judgment of posterity as failures the most disastrous. One play indeed-and that not a play included in the luckless volume of 1615-has found an admirer illustrious among the admirers of Cervantes. The scarcity of such zealous devotees for Cervantes' dramatic work is sufficient excuse for a verbatim quotation from Shelley: "I have read the Numancia, and after wading through the singular stupidity of the first act, began to be greatly delighted and at length interested in a very high degree, by the power of the writer in awakening pity and admiration, in which I hardly know by whom he is excelled. There is little, I allow, to be called poetry in this play; but the command of language, and the harmony of versification, is so great as to deceive one into an idea that it is poetry." 1 O si sic omnia! Shelley's is no doubt a mighty name, and he admired with a generosity which would have appealed to Vauvenargues. Unlike El Rufián Dichoso, which is indeed One of those comedies in which you see, As Lope says, the history of the world Brought down from Genesis to the Day of Judgment, the Numancia is redeemed by its solemnity, its sincerity, its majestic pomp. It is in any case infinitely superior both in design and execution to the formal plays and sainetes of which the volume of 1615 is composed. On these the judgment of M. Emile Chasles may, with little qualification, be taken as final: "A entendre ces abstractions bavardes, à voir cette recherche étourdie et ce faux goût, on se croirait à 1 In a letter written from Pisa, April 19, 1821. "The Prose works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Harry Buxton Forman" (London, 1880), iv. p. 200. mille lieues du bon sens viril qui éclatera dans Don Quichotte."1 Posterity, like the friendly critic mentioned in the preface to the volume of the Comedias, has decided that Cervantes' verse is good for nothing. But he was a man with many irons in the fire. For thirty years he had been buffeted about by chance and fortune, picking up a scanty living as he could; shifting from one spot to another; doing common hack-work; writing his Novelas and his Viaje, with a retrospicient eye on the jail; now and again contributing short poems, as he was pleased to call them, to the ecclesiastico - literary tournaments then so much in vogue; and finally, working by fits and starts on the second part of Don Quixote in such intervals of time as he could snatch from the treadmill of bread-winning. The last words of the first part, a quotation (or, more characteristically, a misquotation) from Ariosto Forse altri canterà con miglior plettro-2 left it doubtful whether the writer seriously intended to complete the work himself. Assuredly he mentions the 1 "Miguel de Cervantes: sa vie, son temps, son œuvre politique et littéraire" (Paris, 1866), p. 232. Longfellow had a passage in the "Arte nuevo de hacer comedias " in his mind. "Porque considerando que la cólera De un español sentado no se templa Si no le representan en dos horas Hasta el final juicio desde el Génesis," etc. (Rivadeneyra, xxxviii. p. 231). 2 "Orlando Furioso," xxx. 16. Cervantes, who never verified a quotation, gives it thus: Forsi altro cantera con miglior plectio. forthcoming appearance of Don Quixote in the preface to the Novelas, but in the same passage he mentions the Semanas del Jardín which was never to see the light. A modest writer, however, would never, under any circumstances, have undertaken the task of continuing Don Quixote. A scrupulous writer, not to say a respectable man, would never have undertaken the task without the author's consent. Cervantes, working leisurely at the second part and putting into it as much care as his nature would allow, had apparently reached the fifty-ninth chapter when he learned with angry consternation that a spurious continuation of Don Quixote had been published at Tarragona, by an allonymous writer calling himself Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda. It was by no means a new thing in the history of Spanish letters that a work begun by one hand should be ended by another. The Diana of Montemayor had been thus continued in 1564 both by Alonso Pérez and Gil Polo; while in 1605 (the year in which the first part of Don Quixote was published) Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache was similarly treated by Juan Martí, under the pseudonym of Mateo Luján de Sayavedra. It may be freely admitted, then, that Avellaneda had more than one bad precedent. But the most shameless of these self-nominated assistants had generally thought it necessary to allude to the original writer in terms of civility, or, at least, to abstain from coarse invective and indecent obloquy. Avellaneda, however, improving on previous examples, overflows with insolence and He takes the opportunity of venom at every pore. sneering at Cervantes' bragging preface, proclaims him a surly grumbler like most other jail-birds, and, with unholy exultation, declares that the tongue of the worldworn veteran wags more freely than his hand-the hand which had been injured at Lepanto.' Góngora had, with characteristic amiability, compared Cervantes to the gray, battered castle of San Cervantes; and Avellaneda, whose originality was certainly not his strongest point, hastened to adopt the image of effete senility as his own." It has been thought that behind the mask of Avellaneda might be discerned the personality of the Inquisitor-General, Luís de Aliaga, of the miserable Dominican Blanco de Paz of Algiers, of Andrés Pérez, the author of the pornographic Picara Justina, of Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola, of Alarcón and, according to the late Mr. Rawdon Browne, the personality of Gaspar Schöppe. This last, the most fantastic conjecture of all, is on a par with the singular theory of the same writer that the original of Sancho Panza was Pedro Franqueza, 1 "Segundo Tomo del Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, que contiene su tercera salida: y es la quinta parte de sus auenturas. Compuesto por el Licenciado Alonso Fernandez de Auellaneda, natural de la Villa de Tordesillas" (Tarragona, 1614). ". . . digo mano, pues cõfiesa de si q tiene sola vna tiene mas lengua que manos. .. Y pues Miguel de Ceruantes es ya de viejo como el Castillo de san Ceruantes, y por los años tã mal contentadizo, q todo y todos le enfadan, y por ello està tan falto de amigos... pero disculpa los hierros de su primera parte en esta materia el auerse escrito entre los de vna carcel, y assi no pudo dexar de salir tiznada dellos, ni salir menos q quexosa, mormuradora, impaciete, y colerica, qual lo esta los encarcelados," etc.-Prólogo. 2 For Góngora's "Romance" see Rivadeneyra, xxxii. p. 513. |