The next performance shows Cervantes tempting fate as a poet. His Viaje del Parnaso (1614) was suggested by the Viaggio di Parnaso (1582) of the Perugian, Cesare Caporali, and is, in effect, a rhymed review of contemporary poets. Verse is scarcely a lucky medium for Cervantic irony, and Cervantes was the least critical of men. His poem is interesting for its autobiographic touches, but it degenerates into a mere stream of eulogy, and when he ventures on an attack he rarely delivers it with force or point. He thought, perhaps, to put down bad poets as he had put down bad prose-writers. But there was this difference, that, though admirable in prose, he was not admirable in verse. In the use of the first weapon he is an expert; in the practice of the second he is a clever amateur. Cervantes satirising in prose and Cervantes satirising in verse are as distinct as Samson unshorn and Samson with his hair cut. Fortunately he appends a prose postscript, which reveals him in his finest manner. Nor is this surprising. Apollo's letter is dated July 22, 1614; and we know that, two days earlier, Sancho Panza had dictated his famous letter to his wife Teresa. The master had found himself once more. The sequel to Don Quixote, promised in the Preface to the Novelas, was on the road at last. Meanwhile he had busied himself with a sonnet to be published at Naples in Juan Domingo Roncallolo's Varias Aplicaciones, with quatrains for Barrio Ángulo, and stanzas in honour of Santa Teresa.
Moreover, the success of the Novelas induced him to try the theatre again. In 1615 he published his Ocho Comedias, y ocho Entremeses nuevos. The eight set pieces are failures; and when the writer tries to imitate Lope de Vega, as in the Laberinto de Amor, the failure is conspicuous. Nor does the introduction of a Saavedra among the personages of El Gallardo Español save a bad play. But Cervantes believed in his eight comedias, as he believed in the eight entremeses which are imitated from Lope de Rueda. These are sprightly, unpretentious farces, witty in intention and effect, interesting in themselves and as realistic pictures of low life seen and rendered at first hand. Of these farcical pieces one, Pedro de Urdemalas, is even brilliant.
While Cervantes was writing the fifty-ninth chapter of Don Quixote's Second Part, he learned that a spurious continuation had appeared (1614) at Tarragona under the name of Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda. This has given rise to much angry writing. Avellaneda is doubtless a pseudonym. The King's confessor, Aliaga, has been suspected, on the ground that he was once nicknamed Sancho Panza, and that he thus avenged himself: the idea is absurd, and the fact that Avellaneda makes Sancho more offensive and more vulgar than ever puts the theory out of court. Lope de Vega is also accused of being Avellaneda, and the charge is based on this: that (in a private letter) he once spoke slightingly of Don Quixote. The personal relations between the two greatest Spanish men of letters were not cordial. Cervantes had ridiculed Lope in the Prologue to Don Quixote, had belittled him as a playwright, and had shown hostility in other ways. Lope, secure in his high seat, made no reply, and in 1612 (in another private letter) he speaks kindly of Cervantes. "Cervantophils" insist upon being too clever by half. They first assert that the outward form of Avellaneda's book was an imitation of Don Quixote, and that the intention was "to pass off this spurious Second Part as the true one"; they then contend that Avellaneda's was "a deliberate attempt to spoil the work of Cervantes." These two statements are mutually destructive: one must necessarily be false. It is also argued, first, that Avellaneda's is a worthless book; next, that it was written by Lope, the greatest figure, save Cervantes, in Spanish literature. Lope had many jealous enemies, but no contemporary hints at such a charge, and no proof is offered in support of it now. Indeed the notion, first started by Máinez, is generally abandoned. Other ascriptions, involving Blanco de Paz, Ruiz de Alarcón, Andrés Pérez, are equally futile. The most plausible conjecture, due to D. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, is that Avellaneda was a certain Aragonese, Alfonso Lamberto. Lamberto's very obscurity favours this surmise. Had Avellaneda been a figure of great importance, he had been unmasked by Cervantes himself, who assuredly was no coward.
We owe to Avellaneda a clever, brutal, cynical, amusing book, which is still reprinted. Nor is this our only debt to him: he put an end to Cervantes' dawdling and procured the publication of the second Don Quixote. Cervantes left it doubtful if he meant to write the sequel; he even seems to invite another to undertake it. Nine years had passed, during which Cervantes made no sign. Avellaneda, with an eye to profit, wrote his continuation in good faith, and his insolent Preface is explained by his rage at seeing the bread taken out of his mouth when the true sequel was announced in the Preface to the Novelas. Had not his intrusion stung Cervantes to the quick, the second Don Quixote might have met the fate of the second Galatea—promised for thirty years and never finished. As it is, the hurried close of the Second Part is below the writer's common level, as when he rages at Avellaneda, and wishes that the latter's book be "cast into the lowest pit of hell." But this is its single fault, which, for the rest, is only found in the last fourteen chapters. The previous fifty-eight form an almost impeccable masterpiece. As an achievement in style, the Second excels the First Part. The parody of chivalresque books is less insistent, the interest is larger, the variety of episode is ampler, the spirit more subtly comic, the new characters are more convincing, the manner is more urbane, more assured. Cervantes' First Part was an experiment in which he himself but half believed; in the Second he shows the certainty of an accepted master, confident of his intention and his popularity. So his career closed in a blaze of triumph. He had other works in hand: a play to be called El Engaño á los Ojos, the Semanas del Jardín, the Famoso Bernardo, and the eternal second Galatea. These last three he promises in the Preface to Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1617), a posthumous volume "that dares to vie with Heliodorus," and was to be "the best or worst book ever written in our tongue." Ambitious in aim and in manner, the Persiles has failed to interest, for all its adventures and scapes. Yet it contains perhaps the finest, and certainly the most pathetic passage that Cervantes ever penned—the noble dedication to his patron, the Conde de Lemos, signed upon April 19, 1616. In the last grip of dropsy, he gaily quotes from a romance remembered from long ago:—
"Puesto ya el pié en el estribo"—
"One foot already in the stirrup." With these words he smilingly confronts fate, and makes him ready for the last post down the Valley of the Shadow. He died on April 23, nominally on the same day as Shakespeare, whose death is dated by an unreformed calendar. They were brethren in their lives and afterwards. Montesquieu, in the Lettres Persanes, makes Rica say of the Spaniards that "le seul de leurs livres qui soit bon est celui qui a fait voir la ridicule de tous les autres." If he meant that Don Quixote was the one Spanish book which has found acceptance all the world over, he spoke with equal truth and point. A single author at once national and universal is as much as any literature can hope to boast.
In his own day Cervantes was shone down by the ample, varied, magnificent gifts of Lope Félix de Vega Carpio (1562-1635): a very "prodigy of nature," as his rival confesses. A prodigy he was from his cradle. At the age of five he lisped in numbers, and, unable to write, would bribe his schoolmates with a share of his breakfast to take down verses at his dictation. He came of noble highland blood, his father, Félix de Vega, and his mother, Francisca Fernández, being natives of Carriedo. Born in Madrid, he was there educated at the Jesuit Colegio Imperial, of which he was the wonder. All the accomplishments were his: still a child, he filled his copy-books with verses, sang, danced, handled the foil like a trained sworder. His father, a poet of some accomplishment, died early, and Lope forthwith determined to see the world. With his comrade, Hernando Muñoz, he ran away from school. The pair reached Astorga, and turned back to Segovia, where, being short of money, they tried to sell a chain to a jeweller, who, suspecting something to be wrong, informed the local Dogberry. The adventurous couple were sent home in charge of the police. Lope's earliest surviving play, El verdadero Amante, written in his thirteenth year, is included in the fourteenth volume of his theatre, printed in 1620. Nicolás de los Ríos, one of the best actor-managers of his time, was proud to play in it later; and, crude as it is in phrasing, it manifests an astonishing dramatic gift.
The chronology of Lope's youth is perplexing, and the events of this time are, as a rule, wrongly given by his biographers, even including that admirable scholar, Cayetano Alberto de la Barrera y Leirado, whose Nueva Biografía is almost above praise. In a poetic epistle to Luis de Haro, Lope asserts that he fought at Terceira against the Portuguese: "in my third lustre"—en tres lustros de mi edad primera: and Ticknor is puzzled to reconcile this with facts. It cannot be done. Lope was fifteen in 1577, and the expedition to the Azores occurred in 1582. The obvious explanation is that Lope was in his fourth lustre, but that, as cuatro would break the rhythm of the line, he wrote tres instead. Some little licence is admitted in verse, and literal interpreters are peculiarly liable to error. At the same time, it should be said that Lope is coquettish as regards his age. Thus, he says that he was a child at the time of the Armada, being really twenty-six; and that he wrote the Dragontea in early youth, when, in fact, he was thirty-five. This little vanity has led to endless confusion. It is commonly stated that, on Lope's return from the Azores, he entered the household of Gerónimo Manrique, Bishop of Ávila, who sent him to Alcalá de Henares. That Lope studied at Alcalá is certain; but undergraduates then matriculated earlier than they do now. When Lope's first campaign ended he was twenty-one, and therefore too old for college. He was a Bachelor before ever he went to the wars. The love-affair, recounted in his Dorotea, is commonly said to have prevented his taking orders at Alcalá: in truth, he never saw the lady till he came back from the Azores! He became private secretary to Antonio Álvarez de Toledo y Beaumont, fifth Duque de Alba, and grandson of the great soldier; but the date cannot be given precisely. As far back as 1572 he had translated Claudian's Rape of Proserpine into Castilian verse, and we have already seen him joined with Cervantes in penning complimentary sonnets for Padilla and López Maldonado (1584). It may be that, while in Alba's service, he wrote the poems printed in Pedro de Moncayo's Flor de varios romances (1589).
The history of these years is obscure. It is usually asserted that, while in Alba's service, about the year 1584-5, Lope married, and that he was soon afterwards exiled to Valencia, whence he set out for Lisbon to join the Invincible Armada. This does not square with Lope's statement in the Dedication of Querer la propia Desdicha to Claudio Conde. There he alleges that Conde helped him out of prison in Madrid, a service repaid by his helping Conde out of the Serranos prison at Valencia, and he goes on to say that "before the first down was on their cheeks" they went to Lisbon to embark on the Armada. He nowhere alleges that they started from Valencia, or that the journey followed the banishment. In an eclogue to the same Conde, Lope avers that he joined the Armada to escape from Filis (otherwise Dorotea), and he adds:—"Who could have thought that, returning from the war, I should find a sweet wife?" The question would be pointless if Lope were already married. Moreover, Barrera's theory that the intrigue with Dorotea ended in 1584 is disproved by the fact that the Dorotea contains allusions to the Conde de Melgar's marriage, which, as we know from Cabrera, took place in 1587. What is certain is that Lope went aboard the San Juan, and that during the Armada expedition he used his manuscript verses in Filis's praise for gun-wads.
He was a first-class fighting-man, and played his part in the combats up the Channel, where his brother was killed beside him during an encounter between the San Juan and eight Dutch vessels. Disaster never quenched his spirit nor stayed his pen; for, when what was left of the defeated Armada returned to Cádiz, he landed with the greater part of his Hermosura de Angélica—eleven thousand verses, written between storm and battle, in continuation of the Orlando Furioso. First published in 1602, the Angélica comes short of Ariosto's epic nobility, and is unrelieved by the Italian's touch of ironic fantasy. Nor can it be called successful even as a sequel: its very wealth of invention, its redundant episodes and innumerable digressions, contribute to its failure. But the verse is singularly brilliant and effective, while the skill with which the writer handles proper names is almost Miltonic.