History of Spanish Literature, vol. 3 (of 3)

by George Ticknor

But in 1847 the whole subject came up afresh. Don Adolfo de Castro, a young Andalusian gentleman, much devoted to researches in early Spanish literature, and the author of several curious historical works, which give proof of his success, declared that he had accidentally found a copy of the Buscapié. In 1848 he published it at Cadiz, in a duodecimo volume, with a body of very learned notes,—the text, in large type, making forty-six pages, and the notes one hundred and eighty-eight pages, which, if printed with the same type, would make above two hundred and fifty.

In the Preface, Don Adolfo declares, that the Buscapié he thus publishes was printed from a manuscript which he had obtained from the library of Don Pascual de Gándara, a lawyer of the city of San Fernando, which library, apparently after the death of its owner, had been brought, less than three months before, to the city of Cadiz, the residence of Don Adolfo, to be publicly sold;—that the title of the manuscript, which purports throughout to be the work of Cervantes, is “The very pleasant little Book, called the Squib, in which, besides its much and excellent Learning, are explained all the hidden and unexplained Matters in the Ingenious Knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha, written by a certain Cervantes de Saavedra”;—that the manuscript in question is not in the handwriting of Cervantes, but, as appears by a memorandum following the title, is a copy made at Madrid, February 27, 1606, for Agostin de Molina, son of Argote de Molina, and that it had subsequently come into the possession of the Duke of Lafões, of the royal family of Braganza;—that it contains no allusion whatever disrespectful to the Emperor Charles the Fifth, for whom, as Don Adolfo believes, Cervantes had a sincere admiration;—that it was, according to the Aprobacion of Gutierre de Cetina, June 27, 1605, and that of Thomas Gracian Dantisco, on the 6th of August following, prepared for the press, but that it was not in fact printed, or it would not have been needful to make a copy of it in manuscript the next year;—and that the true and real object of the Squib was, not to attract attention to the Don Quixote, but to defend that work against many persons accounted learned, who, as Don Adolfo suggests, had attacked it with some severity.

In the Buscapié, which immediately follows these statements, Cervantes represents himself as riding on his mule one day upon the road to Toledo, a little beyond the Puente Toledana, when he sees coming towards him a Bachelor mounted on a sorry hack, that at last falls with him to the ground, in the midst of a contest between the beast and his rider, as to whether they shall go on or no. Cervantes courteously helps the stranger to rise; and then, after a few introductory words, they agree to spend together, under some neighbouring trees, the heat of the day, then fast coming upon them. The Bachelor, a foolish, conceited little fellow, with a very deformed person, produces two books for their common entertainment. The first of them is “The Spiritual Verses of Pedro de Ezinas,” which they both praise, and of whose author Cervantes speaks as of a personal acquaintance. The other is the Don Quixote, which the Bachelor treats very slightingly, and which Cervantes, a little disturbed by such contempt, maintains, in general terms, to be a book of merit, not hinting, however, to the Bachelor that he is its author, and putting his defence on the ground, that it is a well-intended attempt to drive the institution of chivalry from the world.

But the vain, garrulous little Bachelor prefers to talk about himself or to tell stories about his father, and is with difficulty brought back to the Don Quixote, which he then assails as a book absurdly recognizing the existence of knight-errantry at the time it was published, and therefore at the very time when they are talking about it,—a position which Cervantes fully admits and then defends, alleging, in proof of its truth, the examples of Suero de Quiñones and Charles the Fifth; while, on the other side, the Bachelor sets forth, how glad he should be if it were really so, because he would then turn knight himself, and come by a princess and a kingdom as other knights had done before him;—all in a strain as crazy as that of the hero of Cervantes, and sometimes much resembling it. Cervantes replies, maintaining the real, actual existence of knight-errantry in his own time by the examples of Olivier de Lamarche and others, which are as little to the purpose as those of Quiñones and the Emperor Charles the Fifth, already cited by him; and so the discussion goes on, until a scene occurs between the hack of the Bachelor and the mule of Cervantes, not unlike that between Rozinante and the horse-flesh of the Galician carriers, in the fifteenth chapter of the First Part of Don Quixote, and one that ends with the total overthrow and demolition of the Bachelor’s beast. This breaks up the conversation between their two riders, and brings the pamphlet to a conclusion,—Cervantes leaving the unlucky Bachelor to get out of his troubles as best he may.

On closing this gay little trifle, we are at once struck with the circumstance, that the Buscapié we have just read, avowing itself on every page to be the work of Cervantes, and declared never to have been printed till the year 1848, can have nothing at all to do with the anonymous Buscapié of which a printed copy is supposed to have been seen about the year 1759;—in fact, that it involves a formal and complete contradiction of every thing of consequence that was ever said or supposed on the subject, before it appeared. This simplifies the matter very much. It is as if a Buscapié had never before been mentioned, and we are therefore to examine the one now published by Don Adolfo de Castro as if the statement of Los Rios and the letter of Ruydiaz had never appeared.

The next thing that occurs to us is the strangeness of the circumstance, that the copy of such a work, not anonymous, but professing to have been written by the greatest and most popular genius of his nation, should, during two centuries and a half, have attracted nobody’s notice; though, during that time, it must have travelled from Madrid to Lisbon and from Lisbon back again to Spain, and though, during the last seventy years, a Buscapié has been much talked about and eagerly asked for.

Nor is the history of the individual manuscript now printed and offered to us, so far as it professes to have a history, more satisfactory. It claims to have been owned by three persons, and a word must be said about each of them.

First, it is said to have been “copied from another copy in the year 1606, at Madrid, on the 27th of February of the said year, for Señor Agustin de Argote, son of the very noble Señor (may he be in holy glory!) Gonzalo Zatieco de Molina, a knight of Seville.”[459] Now, that Argote Zatieco de Molina, a person I have often had occasion to mention, (see, ante, Vol. I. pp. 74, 75, 77, 117, etc.,) was, as this certificate sets forth, dead in 1606, I have no doubt. A manuscript copy of his well-known hints for the history of Seville, now in the possession of one of my friends, contains notices and documents relating to his life, collected, apparently, by the early copyist, from which we learn that Argote de Molina, by a deed dated July 5, 1597, left to his daughter, two sisters, and a brother the patronage of a chaplaincy he had founded in a chapel prepared by him for his burial-place in the church of Santiago, at Seville;[460] and that in 1600 this chapel was completed, and an inscription placed in it, signifying that it was the burial-place of Argote de Molina, late a chief of the Hermandad, and a Veintequatro, or Regidor, of Seville;[461] from all which, as well as from other grounds, it appears that Argote de Molina died between 1597 and 1600. But why is no son of his mentioned in the deed of 1597, providing for the care of his chapel and the protection of his family burial-place after his own death? This is explained by Ortiz de Zuñiga, the very best authority on such a point, who, when giving an account of Argote de Molina and his manuscripts, some of which Zuñiga had then in his possession, says that Argote de Molina had sons, but that they died before him, and that their loss so embittered the latter part of his life, that his reason was impaired by it.[462] What, then, are we to say about this “Agustin,” for whom Don Adolfo’s copy of the Buscapié is certified to have been made in 1606, after the death of his father, Argote, who died without leaving any son?

The second trace of this manuscript is, that it professes to have been a part of the library of the Duke of Lafões; the inscription to this effect being in Portuguese, and without a date.[463] But is it likely that such a manuscript could have remained in such a position unnoticed? Is it likely that João de Braganza, one of the most cultivated and distinguished men of his time, who was born in 1719, and died in 1806; who was the friend of the Prince de Ligne, of Maria Theresa, and of Frederic the Great; who founded the Academy of Lisbon, and was its head till his death; in whose family lived Correa de Serra, and who every evening collected the chief men of letters of his country in his saloon,—is it likely that a work avowedly by Cervantes, and one concerning which, after 1780, the Spanish Academy had caused much inquiry to be made, should have remained in the library of such a man without attracting, during his long life, either his own notice or that of the scholars by whom he was surrounded? Or, finally, as to the third and last presumed possessor of this manuscript of the Buscapié, is it likely that it would have wandered on without being recognized by any body until it found its obscure way into the collection of an Andalusian advocate,—Don Pascual de Gándara,—and that even he, in the nineteenth century, when Navarrete and Clemencin were keeping alive the discussion of the eighteenth about it, should yet know nothing of its import or pretensions, or, knowing them, should withhold his knowledge from all the world?

Thus much for the external evidence, the whole of which, I believe, I have examined. It is, as it seems to me, very suspicious and unsatisfactory.