And portance in my travels’ history.
This to hear would Catalina seriously incline, yet there is reason to think that the members of her family were less susceptible, and regarded Cervantes as an undesirable suitor. He undoubtedly was, from a mundane point of view; but the marriage took place on December 12, 1584, and next spring the First Part of La Galatea (which had been licensed in the previous February) was published. It is perhaps not without significance that the volume was issued at Alcalá de Henares: it would have been more natural and probably more advantageous to publish the book at Madrid where Cervantes resided, but his name carried no weight with the booksellers of the capital, and no doubt he was glad enough to strike a bargain with his fellow-townsman Blas de Robles. Robles behaved handsomely, for he paid the author, then unknown outside a small literary circle, a fee of 1336 reales—say £30, equal (we are told) to nearly £150 nowadays. Perhaps some modern novelists have received even less for their first work. With this small capital the newly-married couple set up house in Madrid: the bride had indeed a small dowry including forty-five chickens, but the dowry was not made over to her till twenty months later. The marriage does not seem to have been unhappy, as marriages go; but, owing to Cervantes’s wandering existence, the pair saw little of each other till the last ten or twelve years of their married life.
By the death of his father on June 13, 1585, Cervantes became the head of the family, and the position was no sinecure. His sister Luisa had entered the convent of Barefooted Carmelites at Alcalá de Henares twenty years before this date, and his brother Rodrigo had been promoted to a commission in the army for his signal gallantry at the Azores. But Cervantes’s mother and his sisters, Andrea and Magdalena, were unprovided for, and looked to him for help. He resumed writing for the stage, and is found witnessing a legal document at the request of Inés Osorio, wife of the theatrical manager Jerónimo Velázquez, with whose name that of Lope de Vega is unpleasantly associated. Now, if not earlier,—as a complimentary allusion in the Galatea might suggest—Cervantes must have met that marvellous youth who was shortly to become the most popular dramatist of the age. Meanwhile Cervantes’s affairs were going ill. According to his own statement he wrote from twenty to thirty plays between 1582 and 1587; but these plays cannot have brought him much money, for there are proofs that some of his family sold outright to a pawnbroker certain articles which Cervantes had left in pledge two years before. Clearly he was hard pressed. He eked out his income by accepting other work unconnected with literature, executed business commissions as far away as Seville, and looked around for permanent employment. He found it as commissary to the Invincible Armada which was then fitting out, and in the autumn of 1587 he took up his new duties in Andalusia. This amounts to a confession of defeat. If a man of exceptional literary genius can thrive on literature, he does not abandon it for a less agreeable occupation. It is a fine thing to write masterpieces, but in order to write them you must contrive to live. Cervantes’s masterpieces lay in the future, and in the meantime he felt the pinch of hunger.
He appears to have obtained his appointment through the influence of a judge in the High Court of Seville, Diego de Valdivia, a namesake of the affable captain in El Licenciado Vidriera; and, after a few months’ probation, his appointment was confirmed anew in January 1588. He had already discovered that there were serious inconveniences attaching to his post, for he had incurred excommunication for an irregular seizure of wheat at Écija. It would be tedious to follow him in his professional visits to the outlying districts of Andalusia. Everything comes to an end at last—even the equipment of the Invincible Armada: when the fleet sailed to meet the enemy Cervantes cheered it on to victory with an enthusiastic ode, and in a second ode he deplored the great catastrophe. He continued in the public service as commissary to the galleys, collecting provisions at a salary of twelve reales a day, making Seville his centre, and lodging in the house of Tomás Gutiérrez. Weary of the sordid life, he applied in 1590 for a post in America, but failed to obtain it. At the end of the petition, Doctor Núñez Morquecho wrote: ‘Let him seek some employment hereabouts.’ Blessings on Doctor Núñez Morquecho, the conscientious official! If he had granted the petitioner’s request, Cervantes might have been more prosperous, but he would not have written Don Quixote. He was forced to remain where he was, engulfed in arid and vexatious routine.
Still one would imagine that he must have discharged his duties efficiently, for he was one of four commissaries specially commended to the King in January 1592 by the new Purveyor-General Pedro de Isunza. Meanwhile his condition grew rather worse than better: his poverty was extreme. The financial administration was thoroughly disorganised, and in 1591 Cervantes had not yet received his salary for 1588. He seems (not unnaturally) to have lost interest in his work, and to have become responsible for the indiscreet proceedings of a subordinate at Teba. Henceforward he was in constant trouble with the authorities. In August 1592 his accounts were found to be irregular, and his five sureties were compelled to pay the balance; he was imprisoned at Castro del Río in September for alleged illegal perquisitioning at Écija, but was released on appeal. Now and then he was tempted to return to literature. He signed a contract at Seville early in September 1592 undertaking to furnish the manager, Rodrigo Osorio, with six plays at fifty ducats apiece: the conditions of the agreement were that Osorio was to produce each play within twenty days of its being delivered to him, and that Cervantes was to receive nothing unless the play was ‘one of the best that had been acted in Spain.’ The imprisonment at Castro del Río a fortnight later interfered with this project: no more is heard of it, and Cervantes resumed his work as commissary. Two points of personal interest are to be noted in the ensuing years: in the autumn of 1593 Cervantes lost his mother, and in the autumn of 1594 he visited Baza, where (as Sr. Rodríguez Marín has shown recently in an open letter addressed to me[99]) his old enemy Blanco de Paz was residing. As the population of Baza amounted only to 1537 persons at the time, the two men may easily have met: the encounter would have been worth witnessing, for Cervantes was a master of pointed expression.
He passed on his dreary round to Málaga and Ronda, returning to his headquarters at Seville, where, most likely, he wrote the poem in honour of St. Hyacinth which won the first prize at Saragossa on May 7, 1595. As the prize consisted of three silver spoons, it did not greatly relieve his financial embarrassments. These rapidly grew worse. Cervantes had deposited public moneys with a Portuguese banker in Seville; the banker failed and fled, and, as Cervantes was unable to refund the amount, he was suspended. There is a blank in his history from September 1595 to January 1597, when the money was recovered from the bankrupt’s estate. Cervantes, however, was not restored to his post. This is not surprising; for, though most of us regard him with an affection as real as can be felt for any one who has been in his grave nearly three hundred years, even our partiality stops short of calling him a model official. He was not cast in the official mould. Cervantes, collecting oil and wrangling over corn in Andalusia, is like Samson grinding in the prison house at Gaza. Misfortune pursued him. The treasury accountants called upon him to furnish sureties that he would attend the Exchequer Court at Madrid within twenty days of receiving a summons dated September 6, 1597. Unable to find bail, he was imprisoned till the beginning of December, when he was released with instructions to present himself at Madrid within thirty days. He does not appear to have left Seville, and he neglected a similar summons in February 1599. This may seem like contempt of court, but no doubt the real explanation is that he had not the money to pay for the journey.
On July 2, 1600, Rodrigo de Cervantes, then an ensign serving under the Archduke Albert in Flanders, was killed in action; but Miguel de Cervantes probably did not hear of this till long afterwards. He now vanishes from sight, for there is another blank in his record from May 1601 to February 1603. We may assume that he lived in extreme poverty at Seville, and when next heard of—at Valladolid in 1603—his circumstances had not greatly improved. His sister Andrea was employed as needlewoman by the Marqués de Villafranca, and her little bill is made out in Cervantes’s handwriting: clearly every member of the family contributed to the household expenses, and every maravedí was welcome. Presumably Cervantes had come to Valladolid in obedience to a peremptory mandamus from the Exchequer Court. A brief enquiry must have convinced the registrars that, with the best will in the world, he was not in a position to make good the sum which (as they alleged) was due to the treasury, and they left him in peace for three years with a cloud over him. He had touched bottom. He had valiantly endured the buffets of fortune, and was now about to enter into his reward.
His mind to him a kingdom was, and during the years of his disgrace in Seville he had lived, unhindered by squalid circumstance, in a pleasaunce of reminiscence and imagination. All other doors being closed to him, he returned to the house of literature, took pen and paper, gave literary form to his experiences and imaginings, and, when drawing on to sixty, produced the masterpiece which has made his name immortal. It may well be, as he himself hints, that Don Quixote was begun in Seville jail: perhaps it was finished there. At any rate there was little to be added to it when the author reached Valladolid in 1603—little beyond the preface and burlesque preliminary verses. By the summer of 1604 Cervantes had found a publisher, and it had leaked out that the book contained some caustic references to distinguished contemporaries. This may account for Lope de Vega’s opinion, expressed in August 1604 (six months before the work was published), that ‘no poet is as bad as Cervantes, nor so silly as to praise Don Quixote.’ This was not precisely a happy forecast. Don Quixote appeared early in 1605, was hailed with delight, and received the dubious compliment of being pirated in Lisbon. Cervantes was the man of the moment, in the first flush of his popularity, when chance played him an unpleasant trick. On the night of June 27, 1605, a Navarrese gallant named Gaspar de Ezpeleta was wounded while in the neighbourhood of the Calle del Rastro, called for aid at the door of No. 11 where Cervantes lodged, was helped into the house, and died there two days later. The inmates were arrested on suspicion, examined by the magistrate, and released on July 1. The minutes of the examination were unpublished till recent years, and these furtive tactics gravely injured the memory of Cervantes, for they suggested the idea that the examination revealed something to his discredit. It reveals that Cervantes’s natural daughter, Isabel de Saavedra (whose mother, Ana Franca de Rojas, had died in 1599 or earlier), was now residing with her father; it proves that Cervantes was still poor, and that calumnious gossip was current in Valladolid; but there is not a tittle of evidence to show that any member of the Cervantes family ever heard of Ezpeleta till he came by his death.
Cervantes had made for himself a great reputation, but Don Quixote did not apparently enrich him: otherwise he would not have asked his publisher for an advance of 450 reales, as we know that he did at some date previous to November 23, 1607. However, we must renounce the pretension to understand Cervantes’s financial affairs. His daughter Isabel, who was unmarried in 1605, reappears in 1608 as the widow of Diego Sanz del Aguila, and as the mother of a daughter: in 1608 she married a certain Luis de Molina, and there are complicated statements respecting a house in the Red de San Luis from which it is impossible to gather whether the house belonged to Isabel, to her daughter, or to her father. We cannot wonder that Cervantes was the despair of the Treasury officials: these officials did, indeed, make a last attempt to extract an explanation from him on November 6 of this very year of 1608, and thenceforward left him in peace.
He settled in Madrid to pass his serene old age. An atmosphere of devotion began to reign in the house in the Calle de la Magdalena where he lived with his wife and his sisters, Andrea and Magdalena. In 1609 he was among the first to join the newly founded Confraternity of the Slaves of the Most Blessed Sacrament; in the same year his wife received the habit of the Tertiaries of St. Francis, as also did Andrea who died four months later (October 9); in 1610 his wife and his surviving sister Magdalena both became professed Tertiaries of St. Francis. It would appear that Cervantes had been aided by the generosity of the Conde de Lemos, and he could not hide his deep chagrin at not being invited to join the household when Lemos was nominated to the viceroyalty of Naples in 1610. The new viceroy chose better than he knew. Cervantes applied himself more closely to literature which he had neglected (so far as publication goes) for the last five years, and, after the death of his sister Magdalena in 1611, the results of his renewed activity were visible. In 1612, when he became a member of the Academia Selvaje (where we hear of his lending a wretched pair of spectacles to Lope de Vega), he finished his Novelas Exemplares which appeared next year. He published his serio-comic poem, the Viage del Parnaso, in 1614; in 1615 he issued a volume containing eight plays and eight interludes, and also published the Second Part of Don Quixote. It is curious that so many things which must have seemed misfortunes to Cervantes have proved to be a gain to us. In 1614 an apocryphal Don Quixote was published at Tarragona by Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda of whom nothing has been discovered, and this spurious sequel contained a preface filled with insolent personalities. If Cervantes had received any one of the appointments in Spanish America for which he petitioned, we should not have had the first Don Quixote; if he had gone to Naples with Lemos we should never have had the second; if it had not been for Avellaneda’s insults, we might have had only an unfinished sequel. Cervantes’s life was now drawing to a close, but his industry was prodigious. Apart from fugitive verses he was engaged on Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, on a play entitled El Engaño á los ojos, the long-promised continuation of the Galatea, and two works which he proposed to call Las Semanas del Jardín and El famoso Bernardo. All are lost to us except Persiles y Sigismunda which appeared posthumously in 1617.