Prolixity, artifice, ostentation, monotony, extravagance, are inherent in the pastoral school; and the Galatea savours of these defects. Yet, for all its weakness, it lacks neither imagination nor contrivance, and its embroidered rhetoric is a fine example of stately prose. Save, perhaps, in the Persiles y Sigismunda, Cervantes never wrote with a more conscious effort after excellence, and, in results of absolute style, the Galatea may compare with all but exceptional passages in Don Quixote. Yet it failed to please, and the author turned to other fields of effort. His verses in Pedro de Padilla's Jardín Espiritual (1585) and in López Maldonado's Cancionero (1586) denote good-nature and a love of literature; and in both volumes Cervantes may have read companion-pieces written by a marvellous youth, Lope de Vega, whom he had already praised—as he praised everybody—in the Canto de Calíope. He could not foresee that in the person of this boy he was to meet his match and more. Meanwhile in 1587 he penned sonnets for Padilla's Grandezas y Excelencias de la Virgen, and for Alonso de Barros' Filosofía cortesana. Verse-making was his craze; and, in 1588, when the physician, Francisco Díaz, published a treatise on kidney disease—Tratado nuevamente impreso acerca de las enfermedades de los riñones—the unwearied poetaster was forthcoming with a sonnet pat to the strange occasion.
Still, though he cultivated verse with as sedulous a passion as Don Quixote spent on Knight-Errantries, he recognised that man does not live by sonneteering alone, and he tried his fate upon the boards. He died with the happy conviction that he was a dramatist of genius; his contemporaries ruled the point against him, and posterity has upheld the decision. He tells us that at this time he wrote between twenty and thirty plays. We only know the titles of a few among them—the Gran Turquesca, the Jerusalén, the Batalla Naval (attributed by Moratín to the year 1584), the Amaranta and the Bosque Amoroso (referred to 1586), the Arsinda and the Confusa (to 1587). It is like enough that the Batalla Naval was concerned with Lepanto, a subject of which Cervantes never tired; the Arsinda existed so late as 1673, when Juan de Matos Fragoso mentioned it as "famous" in his Corsaria Catalana; and our author himself ranked the Confusa as "good among the best." The touch of self-complacency is amusing, though one might desire a better security than Bardolph's.
Two surviving plays of the period are El Trato de Argel and La Numancia, first printed by Antonio de Sancha in 1784. The former deals with the life of the Christian slaves in Algiers, and recounts the passion of Zara the Moor for the captive Aurelio, who is enamoured of Silvia. We must assume that Cervantes thought well of this invention, since he utilised it some thirty years later in El Amante Liberal; but the play is merely futile. The introduction of a lion, of the Devil, and of such abstractions as Necessity and Opportunity, is as poor a piece of machinery as theatre ever saw; the versification is rough and creaking, improvised without care or conscience; the situations are arranged with a glaring disregard for truth and probability. Like Paolo Veronese, Cervantes could rarely resist the temptation of painting himself into his canvas, and in El Trato de Argel he takes care that the prisoner Saavedra should declaim his tirade. The piece has no dramatic interest, and is valuable merely as an over-coloured picture of vicissitudes by one who knew them at first-hand, and who presented them to his countrymen with a more or less didactic intention. Yet, even as a transcript of manners, this luckless play is a failure.
A finer example of Cervantes' dramatic power is the Numancia, on which Shelley has passed this generous judgment:—"I have read the Numancia, and, after wading through the singular stupidity of the First Act, began to be greatly delighted, and at length interested in a very high degree, by the power of the writer in awakening pity and admiration, in which I hardly know by whom he is excelled. There is little, I allow, to be called poetry in this play; but the command of language and the harmony of versification is so great as to deceive one into an idea that it is poetry." Nor is Shelley alone in his admiration. Goethe's avowal to Humboldt is on record:—"Sogar habe ich ... neulich das Trauerspiel Numancia von Cervantes mit vielem Vergnügen gelesen;" but eight years later he confided a revised judgment to Riemer. The gushing school of German Romantics waxed delirious in praise. Thus Friedrich Schlegel surpassed himself by calling the play "godlike"; and August Schlegel, not content to hold it for a dramatic masterpiece, would persuade us to accept it for great poetry. Even Sismondi declares that "le frisson de l'horreur et de l'effroi devient presque un supplice pour le spectateur."
Raptures apart, the Numancia is Cervantes' best play. He has a grandiose subject: the siege of Numantia, and its capture by Scipio Africanus after fourteen years of resistance. On the Roman side were eighty thousand soldiers; the Spaniards numbered four thousand or less; and the victors entered the fallen city to find no soul alive. With scenes of valour is mingled the pathetic love-story of Morandro and Lyra. But, once again, Cervantes fails as a dramatic artist; one doubts if he knew what a plot was, what unity of conception meant. He has scenes and episodes of high excellence, but they are detached from the main composition, and produce all the bad effect of a portrait painted in different lights. Abstractions fill the stage—War, Sickness, Hunger, Spain, the river Duero. But the tirades of rhetoric are unsurpassed by anything from Cervantes' pen, and Marquino's scene with the corpse in the Second Act is pregnant with a suggestion of weirdness which Mr. Gibson has well conveyed:—
Marquino.
"What! Dost not answer? Dost not live again,
Or haply hast thou tasted death once more?
Then will I quicken thee anew with pain,
And for thy good the gift of speech restore.