CHAPTER XI.
Cervantes neglected. — At Seville. — His Failure. — Asks Employment in America. — At Valladolid. — His Troubles. — Publishes the First Part of Don Quixote. — He removes to Madrid. — His Life there. — His Relations with Lope de Vega. — His Tales and their Character. — His Journey to Parnassus, and Defence of his Dramas. — Publishes his Plays and Entremeses. — Their Character. — Second Part of Don Quixote. — His Death.
The low condition of the theatre in his time was a serious misfortune to Cervantes. It prevented him from obtaining, as a dramatic author, a suitable remuneration for his efforts, even though they were, as he tells us, successful in winning public favor. If we add to this, that he was now married, that one of his sisters was dependent on him, and that he was maimed in his person and a neglected man, it will not seem remarkable, that, after struggling on for three years at Esquivias and Madrid, he found himself obliged to seek elsewhere the means of subsistence. In 1588, therefore, he went to Seville, then the great mart for the vast wealth coming in from America, and, as he afterwards called it, “a shelter for the poor and a refuge for the unfortunate.”[123] There he acted for some time as one of the agents of Antonio de Guevara, a royal commissary for the American fleets, and afterwards as a collector of moneys due to the government and to private individuals; an humble condition, certainly, and full of cares, but still one that gave him the bread he had vainly sought in other pursuits.
The chief advantage, perhaps, of these employments to a genius like that of Cervantes was, that they led him to travel much for ten years in different parts of Andalusia and Granada, and made him familiar with life and manners in these picturesque parts of his native country. During the latter portion of the time, indeed, partly owing to the failure of a person to whose care he had intrusted some of the moneys he had received, and partly, it is to be feared, owing to his own negligence, he became indebted to the government, and was imprisoned at Seville, as a defaulter, for a sum so small, that it seems to mark a more severe degree of poverty than he had yet suffered. After a strong application to the government, he was released from prison under an order of December 1, 1597, when he had been confined, apparently, about three months; but the claims of the public treasury on him were not adjusted in 1608, nor do we know what was the final result of his improvidence in relation to them, except that he does not seem to have been molested on the subject after that date.
During his residence at Seville, which, with some interruptions, extended from 1588 to 1598, or perhaps somewhat longer, Cervantes made an ineffectual application to the king for an appointment in America; setting forth by exact documents—which now constitute the most valuable materials for his biography—a general account of his adventures, services, and sufferings while a soldier in the Levant, and of the miseries of his life while he was a slave in Algiers.[124] This was in 1590. But no other than a formal answer seems ever to have been returned to the application; and the whole affair only leaves us to infer the severity of that distress which should induce him to seek relief in exile to a colony of which he has elsewhere spoken as the great resort of rogues.[125]
As an author, his residence at Seville has left few distinct traces of him. In 1595, he sent some trifling verses to Saragossa, which gained one of the prizes offered at the canonization of San Jacinto;[126] in 1596, he wrote a sonnet in ridicule of a great display of courage made in Andalusia after all danger was over and the English had evacuated Cadiz, which, under Essex, Elizabeth’s favorite, they had for a short time occupied;[127] and in 1598, he wrote another sonnet, in ridicule of an unseemly uproar that took place in the cathedral at Seville, from a pitiful jealousy between the municipality and the Inquisition, on occasion of the religious ceremonies observed there after the death of Philip the Second.[128] But except these trifles, we know of nothing that he wrote, during this active period of his life, unless we are to assign to it some of his tales, which, like the “Española Inglesa,” are connected with known contemporary events, or, like “Rinconete y Cortadillo,” savor so much of the manners of Seville, that it seems as if they could have been written nowhere else.
Of the next period of his life,—and it is the important one immediately preceding the publication of the First Part of Don Quixote,—we know even less than of the last. A uniform tradition, however, declares that he was employed by the Grand Prior of the Order of Saint John in La Mancha to collect rents due to his monastery in the village of Argamasilla; that he went there on this humble agency and made the attempt, but that the debtors refused payment, and, after persecuting him in different ways, ended by throwing him into prison, where, in a spirit of indignation, he began to write the Don Quixote, making his hero a native of the village that treated him so ill, and laying the scene of most of the knight’s earlier adventures in La Mancha. But though this is possible, and even probable, we have no direct proof of it. Cervantes says, indeed, in his Preface to the First Part, that his Don Quixote was begun in a prison;[129] but this may refer to his earlier imprisonment at Seville, or his subsequent one at Valladolid. All that is certain, therefore, is, that he had friends and relations in La Mancha; that, at some period of his life, he must have enjoyed an opportunity of acquiring the intimate knowledge of its people, antiquities, and topography, which the Don Quixote shows; and that this could hardly have happened except between the end of 1598, when we lose all trace of him at Seville, and the beginning of 1603, when we find him established at Valladolid.
To Valladolid he went, apparently because the court had been removed thither by the caprice of Philip the Third and the interests of his favorite, the Duke of Lerma; but, as everywhere else, there too, he was overlooked and left in poverty. Indeed, we should hardly know he was in Valladolid at all before the publication of the First Part of his Don Quixote, but for two painful circumstances. The first is an account, in his own handwriting, for sewing done by his sister, who, having sacrificed every thing for his redemption from captivity, became dependent on him during her widowhood and died in his family. The other is, that, in one of those night-brawls common among the gallants of the Spanish court, a stranger was killed near the house where Cervantes lived; in consequence of which, and of some suspicions that fell on the family, he was, according to the hard provisions of the Spanish law, confined with the other principal witnesses until an investigation could take place.[130]
But in the midst of poverty and embarrassments, and while acting in the humble capacity of general agent and amanuensis for those who needed his services,[131] Cervantes had prepared for the press the First Part of his Don Quixote, which was licensed in 1604, at Valladolid, and printed in 1605, at Madrid. It was received with such decided favor, that, before the year was out, another edition was called for at Madrid, and two more elsewhere; circumstances which, after so many discouragements in other attempts to procure a subsistence, naturally turned his thoughts more towards letters than they had been at any previous period of his life.