Of foul, unworthy love shall by a love
All pure be broke! A Christian soul is mine,
And as a Christian’s shall my life be marked;—
Nor gifts, nor promises, nor cunning art,
Shall from the God I serve my spirit turn,
Although the path I trace lead on to death![115]
The conception of this passage and of the scene preceding it is certainly not dramatic, though it is one of those on which, from the introduction of spiritual agencies, Cervantes valued himself. But neither is it without poetry. Like the rest of the piece, it is a mixture of personal feelings and fancies, struggling with an ignorance of the proper principles of the drama, and with the rude elements of the theatre in its author’s time. He calls the whole a Comedia; but it does not deserve the name. Like the old Mysteries, it is rather an attempt to exhibit, in living show, a series of unconnected incidents; but it has no properly constructed plot, and, as he honestly confesses afterwards, it comes to no proper conclusion.[116]
The other play of Cervantes, that has reached us from this period of his life, is founded on the tragical fate of Numantia, which, having resisted the Roman arms fourteen years,[117] was reduced by famine; the Roman forces consisting of eighty thousand men, and the Numantian of less than four thousand, not one of whom was found alive when the conquerors entered the city.[118] Cervantes probably chose this subject in consequence of the patriotic recollections it awakened and still continues to awaken in the minds of his countrymen; and, for the same reason, he filled his drama chiefly with the public and private horrors consequent on the self-devotion of the Numantians.
It is divided into four jornadas, and, like the Trato de Argel, is written in a great variety of measures; the ancient redondilla being preferred for the more active portions. Its dramatis personæ are no fewer than forty in number; and among them are Spain and the River Duero, a Dead Body, War, Sickness, Famine, and Fame; the last personage speaking the Prologue. The action opens with Scipio’s arrival. He at once reproaches the Roman army, that, in so long a time, they had not conquered so small a body of Spaniards,—as Cervantes always patriotically calls the Numantians,—and then announces that they must now be subdued by Famine. Spain enters, as a fair matron, and, aware of what awaits her devoted city, invokes the Duero in two poetical octaves,[119] which the river answers in person, accompanied by three of his tributary streams, but gives no hope to Numantia, except that the Goths, the Constable of Bourbon, and the Duke of Alva shall one day avenge its fate on the Romans. This ends the first act.
The other three divisions are filled with the horrors of the siege endured by the unhappy Numantians; the anticipations of their defeat; their sacrifices and prayers to avert it; the unhallowed incantations by which a dead body is raised to predict the future; and the cruel sufferings to old and young, to the loved and the lovely, and even to the innocence of childhood, through which the stern fate of the city is accomplished. The whole ends with the voluntary immolation of those who remained alive among the starving inhabitants, and the death of a youth who holds up the keys of the gates, and then, in presence of the Roman general, throws himself headlong from one of the towers of the city; its last self-devoted victim.