What is probably an equally unauthentic portrait of Cervantes, but one based upon a more ingenious and plausible theory, was unearthed by the energies of Don José Maria Asensio of Seville, who, in an anonymous manuscript, happened upon a note to the effect that in one of six pictures, painted by Pacheco for a convent at Seville, there was a portrait of Cervantes. Armed with this clue, Señor Asensio went to the Provincial Museum of Seville, and made a careful inspection of the pictures which were painted to commemorate the effective labours of the Redemptorist brethren in releasing captives from Algiers. In one of these, entitled “St. Peter of Nola, in one of the Passages of his Life,” the saint is represented as superintending the launching of a boat. Among the half-dozen figures in the foreground, which are declared to be all portraits, is a man under middle age, with a striking head set upon a strong neck and shoulders, and with the defect of the left hand seemingly disguised by obscure
DON QUIXOTE DISCOURSING ON THE GOLDEN AGE.
London, 1738.
7th Edition.
painting. The fine eyes are set beneath a broad forehead, the nose is prominent and well defined, while the weakness in the chin and jaw are not uncharacteristic of the general character of Cervantes. These features are, moreover, in keeping with the description which the author has given us of himself in the prologue of Novelas Exemplares, already referred to, and which, of course, was followed by William Kent. Thus he presents himself to his readers: “He, whom you see here, of aquiline feature, with chestnut hair, a smooth, unruffled forehead, with sparkling eyes, and a nose arched though well proportioned; a beard of silver, which, not twenty years since, was of gold; great moustaches, a small mouth, the teeth of no account, for he has but six of them, and they in bad condition and worse arranged, for they do not hold correspondence one with another; the body between two extremes, neither great nor little; the complexion bright, rather white than brown, somewhat heavy in the shoulders. This, I say, is the aspect of the author of Don Quixote of La Mancha.” With this detailed description we must be content; and if it is not a portrait, it is sufficient to afford us material for recreating a picture of Cervantes according to our individual tastes.
It is generally agreed that the novels which Cervantes published in 1613, under the title of Novelas Exemplares—because “there is not one of them from which some profitable example cannot be drawn”—were written many years before, but there seems equally as good reason for supposing that they were the results of his last seven years residence in Madrid. In variety of subject and manner, in the extraordinary knowledge of life that they reveal, in the mature art with which they are told, they exhibit the hand of the experienced craftsman, and warrant the eulogy of the author, who wrote of them that “had they not been turned out of the workshop of his wit, he might presume to place them by the side of the best ever designed.” After Don Quixote, they are reckoned in Spain amongst the best stories of their kind in the language; but they have achieved little popularity out of the Peninsula. Yet they have not been without their fervent admirers in this country, and amongst them Sir Walter Scott must be acknowledged the chief, since Lockhart declares that it was these stories of Cervantes that inspired the author of the Waverley novels to his first essay in fiction.
In the following year, 1614, Cervantes published two volumes of his writings, Viaja del Parnaso and a collection of plays. The poem, though based on an ingenious idea, and containing some of the best verse which the poet has given us, justifies the contemporary verdict upon his compositions, which was, as Cervantes himself tells us, that “of his prose much was to be expected, but of his verse nothing.” The Journey Around Parnassus is written in imitation of a poem, now forgotten, by the Italian author, Cesare Caporali, and it serves as a record of the names of a string of Spanish minor poets whom Cervantes praises with more credit to his heart than his discrimination. His own generation allowed the book to fall still-born from the press, and its one interest to modern Cervantists lies in the autobiographical details which are to be found in the prose prefix. We read here that he is residing in the Calle de las Huertas, in a house “over against the mansion where the Prince of Morocco used to live;” we are introduced to the beruffled, exquisite, and would-be poet (by the correction of whose verses Cervantes doubtless derived part of his slender income); we learn that his niece paid a real for postage on a letter which contained nothing more valuable than an anonymous, defamatory sonnet upon the author of Don Quixote; and, finally, we are told that the writer has in hand a dozen comedies and farces in equal proportions, which, having been rejected of theatre-managers, he proposes to present to the world in book form.
The volume of eight comedies and eight farces here referred to was published in the same year. A bookseller, being found, willing to take the risks of publishing them, Cervantes tells us in his preface that he “made the venture and sold them to the bookseller, who sent them to the Press. He paid me a reasonable sum for them; I took the money meekly, without making account of the quirks and quibbles of the players. I would they were the best in the world, or, at least, of fair worth.” But the pieces fared no better at the hands of the public than they had with the theatre-managers. Nor did they deserve a better fate, being unworthy of the author of Don Quixote, or even of the Numancia of his earlier days. Cervantes, rendered desperate by want, has in these pages deviated from the principles that he had laid down for his own guidance, and his object would appear to be to woo the public by pandering to their debased taste. But as he had before been compelled to give place, as a playwright, to men who possessed a greater share of dramatic sense and fitness, so now he was competing vainly with men, less gifted than himself, who had more accurately gauged the public taste, and were more dexterous in catering for it. In letters, more often than in any other branch of the arts, the man of genius who writes down to his public falls short of success. It is the second-rate writers who undertake seriously the task which the master attempts, with his tongue in his cheek and contempt for his output in his heart, who achieve their object. So Cervantes failed again as a playwright, and he failed so conspicuously that Blas de Nasarre, who republished these poor farces and more inferior comedies in 1749, claimed that the author had written them in ridicule of Lope de Vega, just as he had written Don Quixote in ridicule of the books of chivalry; while his always appreciative biographer, H. E. Watts, concludes that Cervantes “intended them as specimens of the drama which was in vogue in his day, rather than as