The Life of Cervantes

by Albert Frederick Calvert

Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly, whose study of Cervantes’ life and character is instinct with a wholesome sanity and a freedom from all sentimental adulation, does not fail to detect the extravagant sanguineness which inspired many of these attempts at escape. To him, “the whole story of this captivity reads like a page from some wild impossible romance;” but while his judicious biographer can smile at Cervantes’ “sublime self-confidence,” and regard his affairé with the unknown Portuguese lady without hysteria, and is not even convinced that Christendom was saved on the great day of Lepanto, by the single arm of our hero, he is not lacking in sincere appreciation of the many virtues of the author of Don Quixote. Cervantes was not a great poet, or a great dramatist, or a great man of business; viewed in the light of the age in which he lived, and Mr. Kelly never fails to bear this fundamental condition in mind, he was an honourable, right-living man, who made no pretentions to being an ascetic or a saint. Mr. Kelly can detect the minor blemishes of a nature which had the defects of its own virtues; he realises that his frequent and fruitless dashes for liberty, which only intensified the severity of his captivity, were inspired by a reckless, uncalculating optimism; but he is not blind to the sympathetic, generous spirit which not even malignant oppression could imbitter, or to the buoyant temperament which the sternest fates could not deaden.

“To say that when Cervantes left his home of servitude,” Mr. Kelly writes, “he was in every respect the same man as when he entered it, would be to say that he was deaf to the voice of wisdom, and blind to the disillusioning teaching of experience. He had had borne in on him ‘the sense that every struggle brings defeat,’ and had realised the width and depth of the vast abyss which yawns between the easy project and the painful, nebulous, far-off achievement. Something of the invincible confidence, the early ardour, the unquestioning trustfulness of youth had passed with the passing years, and melted into the grey, sombre ether of the past; but nothing misanthropic mingled with his splendid scorn, his magnificent disdain for the base and the ignoble; nothing of the cruel, fierce indignation of Swift gleamed from those quiet, searching eyes, which watched the absurdities of his fellow-men with a humorous, whimsical, indulgent smile. In the squalid prison life his strenuous courage, his iron constancy and self-sacrificing devotion had drawn every heart towards him with one exception—that of the scandalous, shameless friar, Blanco de Paz.”

After seven years of intermittant activity, and yet another five of terrible captivity, in the service of Spain, we find Cervantes, at the age of thirty-three, the “captain of his fate,” but attached to no regiment; the “master of his soul,” but master of nothing else. He carried his honourable wounds and the traces of his duress with pride, but so far as worldly advancement went, they did not serve him. He might well have cried, in the spirit and words of W. E. Henley:

“Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody but unbowed;”

but the king, for whom he had shed his blood, was unmindful of him; his patron, Don Juan of Austria, was dead, and he had perforce to commence the business of life over again, without a friend and with a financial liability in the matter of his ransom, which was to take him four years to pay off. But he would appear to have been without regrets or repinings—he had regained his liberty, and we know in what measure he prized it. He must have been re-living the emotions he experienced on his return to his native land, when he made Don Quixote declare to his faithful squire: “Liberty ... is one of the most valuable blessings that heaven has bestowed upon mankind. Not all the treasures concealed in the bowels of the earth, nor those in the bosom of the sea can be compared with it. For liberty a man may—nay, ought—to hazard even his life, as well as for honour, accounting captivity the greatest misery he can endure.”

History tells us that even in the comparatively brief period of Cervantes’ captivity the decline of the mighty Empire of Spain had commenced. The inherent meanness of Philip’s spirit, his religious intolerance, his incompetence as both statesman and soldier, and the dominant power of the priests, had sapped the nation’s energy, and crushed national ambition. The character of the king set the seal on the country’s destiny. He abhorred letters, and was jealous of intellectual eminence; he was feeble and timorous in his foreign policy, and starved the soldiers upon whom the burden of maintaining the Empire rested; his one love and ambition was for the Church, which was sapping the life blood of the nation. Of the 50,000,000 people who constituted the population of his dominions, no fewer than a million persons were in the service of the Church. There were archbishops by the score, bishops by the

hundred, and lesser ecclesiastes by the hundreds of thousands. The Holy Office alone offered a sure road to advancement and position, and many there were that walked therein.

But Cervantes, undashed by ingratitude and undaunted by hardship, retained his loyalty, and relinquished not a tittle of his chivalrous conceptions and aspirations. He was still desperately sincere in the convictions, which never left him, that “there is nothing in the world more commendable than to serve God in the first place, and the King in the next, especially in the profession of arms, which, if it does not procure a man so much riches as learning, may at least entitle him to more honour.” As the profession of arms had won him no honour, so he was to learn by experience that learning would deny him riches; but the knowledge that he had deserved the one, and had been instrumental in the accumulation, if not in the participation, of the other, may have afforded him some slight comfort. That he revelled in the desperate chances, as well as in the prospect of winning honour, which the soldiers’ life had to give, may be gathered from the exhortation which he makes Don Quixote give to the young soldier: “I would not have you be uneasy with thoughts of what misfortunes may befall you; the worst can be but to die, and if it be a good, honourable death your fortune is made, and you are certainly happy.... For suppose you should be cut off at the very first engagement by a canon ball, or the springing of a mine, what matters it? it is but dying, and there is an end of the business.”