Modern Spain realizes the wrong of persecution, the farce of a religion of love using the sword, as thoroughly as does every other civilized country. Outside the church of St. Philip Neri in Cadiz is a tablet proudly commemorating the abolition of the Inquisition within its walls in 1812.
To return to less nettlesome themes. The little English College, so interesting a memorial of past history, a forgotten haven of refuge in Old Spain, must be a peaceful memory to look back on by priests whose later lives are spent in Birmingham or London slums. The pleasant sitting-room of each inmate, the recreation hall with its theater, the library, with the latest English books jostling old Spanish tomes,—all spoke of contented full days. We turned the parchment leaves where the college records for its three hundred years in Spain have been kept, where each student is mentioned, from the troubled first days down to the group of ten who had arrived from England a week before our visit, among them a young Reginald Vaughan, nephew of the Cardinal.
With up-to-date hospital and busy manufactures, Valladolid does not seem like an ancient capital of the Spanish court. We would read in our guide book that the miserable Juan II had his favorite of a lifetime, Álvaro de Luna, beheaded in the big square; that here Juan's noble daughter married Ferdinand of Aragon; and that, seated on a throne in the Plaza Mayor, Charles V pardoned the remaining Comuneros, the rebels who had dared assert the federal principle against his centralization of government, Spain's last outcry before she sank under the blighting tyranny of her Hapsburg and Bourbon rulers. Such past happenings were interesting, but they would have the same meaning if read of in London or Boston. However, there were two memories of Valladolid that were vivid enough to haunt one as one walked about its hum-drum streets: they are associated with the saddest hours of two supreme men.
No. 7 Calle de Cristóbal Colón is the insignificant house where Isabella's High Admiral died in 1506, in obscurity and neglect, his patroness dead, and Ferdinand ungrateful. A hundred years later, in another small house, now owned by the government, Cervantes lived in poverty. Unknown and undivined he walked these streets, looking at the passers-by with his wise, tolerant eyes. Fresh, perhaps, from writing the monologue on the Golden Age, delivered by the Don over a few brown acorns of inspiration, Cervantes in threadbare cape went to his humble scrivener's work, the golden time of justice and kindness existing only in his own gallant heart. It was in Valladolid that the ladies of his household, widowed sisters, niece, his daughter and wife, sewed to gain their daily bread, and as if penury were not enough, here they were thrown into prison because a young noble, wounded in a street brawl, was carried into their house to die.
Cervantes' life reads like one of the romantic tales he loves to digress with in his great novel, when grandee, barber and priest, court lady, Eastern damsel, and labrador's daughter, gather round the inn table—the servants a natural part of the group—in the easy meeting of the classes which is still a reality in Spain. Born at Alcalá, Cervantes' first bent was toward literature, but having gone to Rome in the suite of a cardinal, in Italy he joined the army against the infidel. He fought at Lepanto, where his bravery drew on him the notice of Don John of Austria, that alluring young leader of whom one of his state council wrote, "Nature had endowed him with a cast of countenance so gay and pleasing that there was hardly anyone whose good-will and love he did not immediately win." It makes a pleasant picture, the visit of this high-spirited young hero to his wounded soldier in the hospital of Messina. Later, Cervantes fought at Naples, at Tunis, in Lombardy, making part of his century's stirring history, and all the while storing his mind with the culture of Italy. It was when returning to Spain that some Algerian pirates took him prisoner. His five years' captivity in Africa stand an unsurpassed exhibition of grandeur of character, proving that the highest gifts of mind and heart go together in perfect accord. Loaded with chains, twice brought to be hanged with a rope around his neck, his knightly spirit rose above all misery. There were twenty-five thousand wretched Christians then in bondage in Algiers. Cervantes waited on the sick, shared his food with the more destitute, encouraged the despairing,—a Christian in the fullest sense of the word is the testimony of a Fray Juan Gil, who, belonging to a brotherhood for the redemption of prisoners, worked for his release. In this harsh school "donde aprendió a tener paciencia en las adversidades"—the adversities that were to follow him all his life—was chastened to self-effacement and a sublime patience an ardent spirit that by nature chafed against wrong.
What wonder that the late flowering of this man's soul, the book written when past middle age, should be of chivalry all compact, a nobility of sentiment exposed half seriously, half in jest! What wonder that in the midst of laughter the voice breaks with tenderness for the lovable caballero andante! His Quixote is Cervantes' own unquenchable spirit. A bitter experience of life never deadened his faith in man nor dulled his heroic gayety. With exquisite humor he realized the alien aspect of such trust and love and faith in the disillusioning realities of life, so he veiled it all under the kindly cloak of a cracked-brained knight. The wandering adventures of a fool make the wisest, most human-hearted book ever written.
Toward the end of his slavery, when Cervantes passed into the hands of the viceroy of Algiers, Hassan Pasha, his force of character gained influence over the tyrant. But he asked too high a ransom for the captive's family to pay. The priest who had watched the young soldier on his deeds of mercy, worked indefatigably for his release. A letter was sent to Philip II to beg aid for a soldier of Lepanto. At length three hundred ducats were raised. Hassan Pasha asked a thousand. Already was Cervantes chained to the oar of a galley, bound for Constantinople, when at the last hour Father Gil, helped by some Christian merchants, succeeded in raising five hundred ducats, which ransom the Viceroy accepted.
At thirty-four years of age, Cervantes again stepped on Spanish soil. But the world was then much as it is now; years had passed since Lepanto,—he was forgotten. His patron Don John of Austria had died in Flanders two years before his release. He joined the army once more and fought in the expedition against the Azores; then seeing there was no chance of advancement, he returned to his first career, that of letters. His plays and poems had small success: a pathetic phrase in the scene where the cura burns Quixote's books and comes on an epic by one, Cervantes, "better versed in poverty and misfortunes than in verses," has deeper meaning when his checkered career is known.
Twenty-five years of obscurity and abject poverty succeeded each other, his lot so lowly it is hard to trace his steps. Whole years remain a blank. The brave heart never flagged, no bitterness tinged his kindly tolerance. This Castilian hidalgo of ripe culture earned his bread in the humblest ways. 1588 found him in Seville as commissary victualer for the Great Armada. Tradition says he visited La Mancha, the desert he was to immortalize, to collect tithes for a priory of St. John, and that the villagers in anger cast him into prison, where he conceived the idea of his novel. This child of his wit he hints to us was born in a jail. The sad years in Valladolid followed, and there in 1605, at fifty-eight years of age, he published the first part of "Don Quixote."
Its success was immediate. The grace of the style, the inimitable humor, and the underflowing current of mellow wisdom, made it from the start, what Sainte-Beuve called it, "the book of humanity." However, its publication did not much better Cervantes' fortunes. He retired to Madrid, where he lived on a small pension from the Archbishop of Toledo. A French noble visiting Spain asked for the famous author, and was told, "He who had made all the world rich was poor and infirm though a soldier and a gentleman."