But though he was thus restored to his home and his country, and though his first feelings may have been as fresh and happy as those he has so eloquently expressed more than once when speaking of the joys of freedom,[96] still it should be remembered that he returned after an absence of ten years, beginning at a period of life when he could hardly have taken root in society, or made for himself, amidst its struggling interests, a place which would not be filled almost as soon as he left it. His father was dead. His family, poor before, had been reduced to a still more bitter poverty by his own ransom and that of his brother. He was unfriended and unknown, and must have suffered naturally and deeply from a sort of grief and disappointment which he had felt neither as a soldier nor as a slave. It is not remarkable, therefore, that he should have entered anew into the service of his country,—joining his brother, probably in the same regiment to which he had formerly belonged, and which was now sent to maintain the Spanish authority in the newly acquired kingdom of Portugal. How long he remained there is not certain. But he was at Lisbon, and went, under the Marquis of Santa Cruz, in the expedition of 1581, as well as in the more important one of the year following, to reduce the Azores, which still held out against the arms of Philip the Second. From this period, therefore, we are to date the full knowledge he frequently shows of Portuguese literature, and that strong love for Portugal which, in the third book of “Persiles and Sigismunda,” as well as in other parts of his works, he exhibits with a kindliness and generosity remarkable in a Spaniard of any age, and particularly in one of the age of Philip the Second.[97]
It is not unlikely that this circumstance had some influence on the first direction of his more serious efforts as an author, which, soon after his return to Spain, ended in the pastoral romance of “Galatea.” For prose pastorals have been a favorite form of fiction in Portugal from the days of the “Menina e Moça”[98] down to our own times; and had already been introduced into Spanish literature by George of Montemayor, a Portuguese poet of reputation, whose “Diana Enamorada” and the continuation of it by Gil Polo were, as we know, favorite books with Cervantes.
But whatever may have been the cause, Cervantes now wrote all he ever published of his Galatea, which was licensed on the 1st of February, 1584, and printed in the December following. He himself calls it “An Eclogue,” and dedicates it, as “the first fruits of his poor genius,”[99] to the son of that Colonna under whose standard he had served, twelve years before, in the Levant. It is, in fact, a prose pastoral, after the manner of Gil Polo’s; and, as he intimates in the Preface, “its shepherds and shepherdesses are many of them such only in their dress.”[100] Indeed, it has always been understood that Galatea, the heroine, is the lady to whom he was soon afterwards married; that he himself is Elicio, the hero; and that several of his literary friends, especially Luis Barahona de Soto, whom he seems always to have overrated as a poet, Francisco de Figueroa, Pedro Lainez, and some others, are disguised under the names of Lauso, Tirsi, Damon, and similar pastoral appellations. At any rate, these personages of his fable talk with so much grace and learning, that he finds it necessary to apologize for their too elegant discourse.[101]
Like other works of the same sort, the Galatea is founded on an affectation which can never be successful; and which, in this particular instance, from the unwise accumulation and involution of the stories in its fable, from the conceited metaphysics with which it is disfigured, and from the poor poetry profusely scattered through it, is more than usually unfortunate. Yet there are traces both of Cervantes’s experience in life, and of his talent, in different parts of it. Some of the tales, like that of Sileno, in the second and third books, are interesting; others, like Timbrio’s capture by the Moors, in the fifth book, remind us of his own adventures and sufferings; while yet one, at least, that of Rosaura and Grisaldo, in the fourth book, is quite emancipated from pastoral conceits and fancies. In all, we have passages marked with his rich and flowing style, though never, perhaps, with what is most peculiar to his genius. The inartificial texture of the whole, and the confusion of Christianity and mythology, almost inevitable in such a work, are its most obvious defects; though nothing, perhaps, is more incongruous than the representation of that sturdy old soldier and formal statesman, Diego de Mendoza, as a lately deceased shepherd.[102]
But when speaking thus slightingly of the Galatea, we ought to remember, that, though it extends to two volumes, it is unfinished, and that passages which now seem out of proportion or unintelligible might have their meaning, and might be found appropriate, if the second part, which Cervantes had perhaps written, and which he continued to talk of publishing till a few days before his death,[103] had ever appeared. And certainly, as we make up our judgment on its merits, we are bound to bear in mind his own touching words, when he represents it as found by the barber and curate in Don Quixote’s library.[104] “‘But what book is the next one?’ said the curate. ‘The Galatea of Miguel de Cervantes,’ replied the barber. ‘This Cervantes,’ said the curate, ‘has been a great friend of mine these many years; and I know that he is more skilled in sorrows than in verse. His book is not without happiness in the invention; it proposes something, but finishes nothing. So we must wait for the second part, which he promises; for perhaps he will then obtain the favor that is now denied him; and in the mean time, my good gossip, keep it locked up at home.’”
If the story be true, that he wrote the Galatea to win the favor of his lady, his success may have been the reason why he was less interested to finish it; for, almost immediately after the appearance of the first part, he was married, December 12th, 1584, to a lady of a good family in Esquivias, a village near Madrid.[105] The pecuniary arrangements consequent on the marriage, which have been published,[106] show that both parties were poor; and the Galatea intimates that Cervantes had a formidable Portuguese rival, who was, at one time, nearly successful in winning his bride.[107] But whether the course of his love ran smooth before marriage or not, his wedded life, for above thirty years, seems to have been happy, and his widow, at her death, desired to be buried by his side.
In order to support his family, he probably lived much at Madrid, where, we know, he was familiar with several contemporary poets, such as Juan Rufo, Pedro de Padilla, and others, whom, with his inherent good-nature, he praises constantly in his later works, and often unreasonably. From the same motive, too, and perhaps partly in consequence of these intimacies, he now undertook to gain some portion of his subsistence by authorship, turning away from the life of adventure to which he had earlier been attracted.
His first efforts in this way were for the stage, which naturally presented strong attractions to one who was early fond of dramatic representations, and who was now in serious want of such immediate profit as the theatre sometimes yields. The drama, however, in the time of Cervantes, was rude and unformed. He tells us, as we have already noticed, that he had witnessed its beginnings in the time of Lope de Rueda and Naharro,[108] which must have been before he went to Italy, and when, from his description of its dresses and apparatus, we plainly see that the theatre was not so well understood and managed as it is now by strolling companies and in puppet-shows. From this humble condition, which the efforts made by Bermudez and Argensola, Virues, La Cueva, and their contemporaries, had not much ameliorated, Cervantes undertook to raise it; and he succeeded so far, that, thirty years afterwards, he thought his success of sufficient consequence frankly to boast of it.[109]
But it is curious to see the methods he deemed it expedient to adopt for such a purpose. He reduced, he says, the number of acts from five to three; but this is a slight matter, and, though he does not seem to be aware of the fact, it had been done long before by Avendaño. He claims to have introduced phantasms of the imagination, or allegorical personages, like War, Disease, and Famine; but, besides that Juan de la Cueva had already done this, it was, at best, nothing more in either of them than reviving the forms of the old religious shows. And finally, though this is not one of the grounds on which he himself places his dramatic merits, he seems to have endeavoured in his plays, as in his other works, to turn his personal travels and sufferings to account, and thus, unconsciously, became an imitator of some of those who were among the earliest inventors of such representations in modern Europe.
But, with a genius like that of Cervantes, even changes or attempts as crude as these were not without results. He wrote, as he tells us with characteristic carelessness, twenty or thirty pieces, which were received with applause;—a number greater than can be with certainty attributed to any preceding Spanish author, and a success before quite unknown. None of these pieces were printed at the time, but he has given us the names of nine of them, two of which were discovered in 1782, and printed, for the first time, in 1784.[110] The rest, it is to be feared, are irrecoverably lost, and among them is “La Confusa,” which, long after Lope de Vega had given its final character to the proper national drama, Cervantes fondly declared was still one of the very best of the class to which it belonged;[111] a judgment which the present age might perhaps confirm, if the proportions and finish of the drama he preferred were equal to the strength and originality of the two that have been rescued.