The Galatea, which was not translated into English until 1867, has enjoyed less vogue in this country than in France, where Florian’s translation is still in demand. In Spain, at least half-a-dozen editions were called for during the lifetime of the author, and so great was the esteem in which it was held at the time, that gentlemen from France, affected to letters, had their Galatea by heart. Cervantes’ Eclogue, or, as we should style it, pastoral romance, was not a literary experiment, being an exercise in the manner of Montemayor’s Diana, and having its inspiration in the fashion of the period. This “firstfruits of his poor wit,” as the author calls it in his preface, is concerned with shepherds and shepherdesses, their loves, their longings, and their lassitudes. The fable is artificial, the language is stilted, the passion false, and the whole, to modern eyes and ears, is tedious, and not a little ridiculous. That it appealed to the current fancy in poetry and fiction is its excuse; that it was at least equal in merit, if not superior, to any contemporary effort of the same class, is its only substantial merit. Some personal interest the pastoral has in the introduction of real persons under romantic names. Cervantes’ own love story is rehearsed in the prologue, the poet masquerades as Elicio, and his wife as Galatea, while Tirsi, Timbrio, Damon, and Erasteso are all friends of the author. Twenty years later Cervantes made merry over this class of literature, when in Don Quixote he makes the Knight, returning vanquished from the Tourney at Barcelona, propose to Sancho Panza that they shall turn shepherds and lead a rural life. He decides to call himself Quixotis, to re-name his Squire, Pansino and Teresa Panza is to be celebrated in the annal of arcady by the style of Teresania. The objects and employment of the shepherds were to consist of poetry and protestation. “For my part,” the Don declared, “I will complain of absence, thou” (his Squire) “shall celebrate thy own loyalty and constancy, the Shepherd Larrascon shall expostulate on his shepherdess’s disdain, and the Pastor Curiambio choose what subject he likes best; and so all will be managed to our hearts’ content”—even as it was managed by Cervantes in the Galatea.
Yet, artificial and uninspiriting as the pastoral appears to-day, it was acclaimed with unstinted praise, both at home and abroad, and caused the author to be classed by Gálvez de Montalvo and by Pedro de Padilla among the most famous poets of Castile. It brought him friends; it gave him enemies; but it was powerless to advance his worldly fortune—the money derived from the sale of the various editions of the book found their way into other pockets.
Of the Galatea, Cervantes has left us his own critical estimate in Chapter iv., Part I., of Don Quixote. The curate and the barber are overhauling the Don’s library—“those unconscionable books of disventures,” the tales of chivalry over which he would pore for eight-and-forty hours together—and of the hundred large volumes, and a good number of small ones, only some half-dozen escape the bonfire that has been built of them in the back yard. The Galatea was one of the exempt. “That Cervantes has been my intimate acquaintance these many years,” cried the curate, “and I know he has been more conversant with misfortunes than with poetry. His book, indeed, has I don’t know what, that looks like a good design; he aims at something, but concludes nothing; therefore, we must stay for the second part, which he has promised us; perhaps he may make us amends, and obtain a full pardon, which is denied him for the present....”
The Galatea, the second part of which was never written, is not lost to us, though it is little read; but of the rest of the survivors of the curate’s conflagration, and which Cervantes praises through the lips of his character—Amadis de Gaul, Palmerin of England, Ten Books of the Fortunes of Love, by Anthony de Lofraco; The Shepherd of Filida, together with the Araucana, of Don Alonso de Ercilla; the Austirada, of Jean Ruffo, a magistrate of Cordova; and the Monserrato, of Christopher de Virves, a Valentian poet—they are now only known because they are mentioned in Don Quixote. Yet of the last three works Cervantes makes the curate declare: “These are the best heroic poems we have in Spanish, and may vie with the most celebrated in Italy. Reserve them as the most valuable performances which Spain has to boast of in poetry.”
Into the profession of letters Cervantes carried a
LETTER ADDRESSED BY CERVANTES TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF TOLEDO, DATED MARCH 26TH, 1616.
principle and a philosophy as commendable and ennobling as the ambition that had sustained him in the profession of arms. “It is laudable,” he declared, “for a poet to employ his pen in a virtuous cause,” and he preached nothing that he did not practise consistently. “Let him direct the shafts of satire against vice,” he continued, “in all its various forms, but not level them at individuals; like some who, rather than not indulge their mischievous wit will hazard a disgraceful banishment to the Isles of Pontus. If the poet be correct in his morals, his verse will partake of the same purity; the pen is the tongue of the mind, and what his conceptions are, such will be his productions.”
And so, with these high ideals in his mind, and but few pieces in his wallet, he married on 12th December, 1584, with Dona Catalina de Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano, a young lady of good family, and in worldly substance the superior of her husband. The tenth of his fortune, which Cervantes settled upon his wife, amounted to 100 ducats, while an inventory of the bride’s effects include several plantations of young vines in the district of Esquívias, a small town of New Castile; six bushels of meal and one of wheat at eight reals, or 1s. 8d.; some articles of household furniture; two linen and three cotton sheets, a cushion and two pillows stuffed with wool; one good blanket, and one worn; tables, chairs, pots, and pans; a brasier, a grater, several jars, sacred images, in alabaster and silver gilt; a crucifix, two little images of the baby Jesus; four beehives, forty-five hens and pullets, and one cock. The lady who brought these curiously varied articles into the common stock bore Cervantes no children, survived him over ten years, and was buried, at her request, at her husband’s side in the convent of the Trinitarian nuns. And in these few lines, her story, so far as we know it, is told.
For a few months Cervantes continued to live at Esquívias, and in 1585 we find him removed to Madrid, where his household consisted, in addition to his wife and his little daughter, Isabel, his widowed sister, Andrea, and her eight-year-old daughter, Constanza. Letters had not then become a recognised profession, and in the domain of poetry, amateurism was a disease. Tinkers, tailors, soldiers, sailors—all rhymed unceasingly. Lope de Vega, who was of the number, wrote: “In every street 4,000 poets;” and Cervantes, in his Voyage around Parnassus, refers to “the vulgar squadron of seven-month poets, 20,000 strong, whose being is a mystery.” Lope de Vega, then, as always, more fortunate than Cervantes, a youth of twenty-three, already famous as a poet and a libertine, was acting as the confidential secretary of the young Duke of Alva. His dissolute life, which occasionally brought him into conflict with the authorities was, on the whole, far more to his advancement than was the virtuous rectitude of Cervantes, and it is possible that the jealousy and rancour with which the