Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/366

354 CERVANTES is not probable that he would be employed on such a purpose. There is better evidence of his hand in a letter to Don Diego de Astudillo Carillo, discovered in the Bibliotheca Colombina at Seville in 1845, giving an account of a bur lesque tourney or poetical joust held in the suburb of San Juan de Alfarache on the feast of St Laurence. From this it would appear that Cervantes was on a visit to Seville in 1606, and on terms of familiar intercourse with many dis tinguished poets ; also that allusions to Don Quixote and quotations from the book were familiar in the .mouths of the wits of the time. Thenceforward to his death, Cer vantes seems to have resided at Madrid, whither he had followed the court from Valladolid, with but little improve ment in his worldly circumstances, supported chiefly by a pension from the archbishop of Toledo, and casual gratui ties from his other patron the Count de Lemos. In Second pnrt 1 608 was published the second edition of the first part of of Don Do n Quixote, with some corrections and additions by the Quixote. author 7^ nex t y ear> following the fashion of the times, he entered as a lay brother into the Oratory of Canizares, together with Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Espinel, and many other of his contemporaries and friends. In 1610, the Count de Lemos was appointed viceroy of Naples, and Cervantes seems to have been indulged with some promises of being made his secretary, but his advanced age and his dependent family were made the pretext for his being passed over in favour of his rival and pretended friend, Leonardo Argensoia. In 1613, he gave to the JVovetas world his Novelas Exemplares, some of which had been Exemplar^, written many years before a collection of tales of very various character, in a style till then unknown in Spain, owing little beyond their form to the Italian models. These stories, undeservedly neglected out of their native country, must be reckoned as second in merit among Cervantes s writings, and even superior to Don Quixote in elegance of style. They are indeed the true originals in the modern literature of Europe of the novel, or story of real life, with plot, character, and scenery, and display in a very remarkable degree not only the .versatility of their author s genius but his extreme familiarity with every type of Spanish society, especially of the lower orders of the people. In the charming story of La Gitandht, among some of the best of Cervantes s lyrics, is to be found the germ of all the gipsy romances, poems, and operas, which have since delighted the world, and in Rinconete y Cortadillo we have a picture of a Spanish Alsatia as vivid and real as anything by Defoe or Dickens. Indeed, these stories, rich in incident, character, and invention, have been a mine in which the novelists and dramatists of all countries have delved, Scott himself, according to Lock- hart, confessing that he first drew from them his idea of writing the Waverley Novels. In his dedication of the Novelets to the Count de Lemos, Cervantes speaks of being engaged on several other works, among them the second part of Don Quixote ; and in the prologue, which contains some interesting details of his biography, he gives this portrait of himself in his 65th year: "Of aquiline features, chesnut hair, a smooth and open forehead, with cheerful eyes, a nose curved though well proportioned, long mustaches, the beard of silver (which twenty years ago was of gold), the mouth small, the teeth not much, for he has but six, and those in bad condition and worse placed for they have no concert one with another ; the body between two extremes, neither large nor small, the complexion lively, rather white than brown, somewhat crooked in the shoulders, and not very light of feet this, I say, is the effigy of the author of Galatea and of Don Quixote de la Alancha." Upon this description of his person to which it may be added that he stammered in his speech and had lost the use of his left hand by the wound received at Lepanto has been founded that ideal portrait, first de signed by the English engraver Kent for Lord Carteret s edition of 1753, and since then ignorantly copied and re peated in Spain and everywhere as the true image of Miguel de Cervantes. In 1614 was published the Viage al Parnaso, which Voyage to with all its faults may be said to be the most successful of Parnassus. our author s essays in verse. It is a burlesque poem, pro fessedly in imitation of one with the same title by the Italian, Cesare Caporali, but having little but the name in common with its predecessor. The half serious half jest ing vein in which Cervantes here indulges was unquestion ably that which was most natural to his genius, and in spite of the cunibrousness of the allegorical machinery, and the excessive laudation which, as usual, he heaps on the small writers his contemporaries, the poem abounds in fancy, humour, and invention. The seventh book, in w r hich is described the encounter between the armies of the good and bad poets, may compare with the Battle of the Books and the fifth canto of the Liitrin Cervantes s fancy of making the combatants wound one another with odes and sonnets is surely happier than either Swift s, where the authors use the ordinary weapons of Homeric war, or Boileau s, where the monks discharge material volumes. Not the least interesting portion of this poem is the fourth book, wherein the author speaks of himself, his labours, and his misfortunes, with a characteristic mix ture of modesty, gaiety, and simple self-confidence. In the prose appendix is a spirited and humorous dia logue with a messenger from Apollo concerning Cer vantes s relations to the theatre, and the reason of his ill- success as a dramatist. After thirty years retirement from the stage, during which interval the great Lope de Vega had arisen in all his glory, and he and his imitators had, by their fertility and their submissive devotion to the vulgar taste no less than by their genius, obtained the com plete mastery of the national drama, Cervantes could hardly hope to recover for himself that position as a play wright to the memory of which he seems to have always clung with tenacity. Encouraged, however, by the renewal of Returns to his popularity as a writer, or stimulated perhaps by ^ le drama, his necessities, he made in his old age another experi ment in the drama, in which it is sad to find that he abandoned all those admirable principles which he had advocated through the mouth of the Canon in Don Quixote, surrendering himself to the vicious models he had himself so eloquently condemned. The result was unfortunate for his reputation. A collection of eight comedies and as many interludes was published in 1614, with a preface in which the author reports naively of his ill-success in the negotiation for a sale of their copyright. He would buy them, the bookseller said, were it not that he had been told by a certain person of distinction that " of the prose of Miguel de Cervantes much could be expected, but of his poetry nothing." This opinion was probably confirmed by these plays, which are so unworthy of their author that when reproduced in 1749 by Bias de Nasarre, that editor maintained the ingenious paradox that Cervantes had made them purposely bad in order to ridicule the plays of the day, just as he had written Don Quixote to ridicule the books of chivalry. There is no need of any such theory to account for the failure of Cervantes iu the drama. His genius was unsuited to the stage. The qualities in which he most excelled were essentially undramatic, nor can his per sistent efforts to recover his position as a playwright, even after the success of Don Quixote had been assured, be explained otherwise than by the fact that the stage was then almost the only road to literary fortune. The first part of Don Quixote had brought him fame, but nothing

more. Before the appearance of the second part, the plan