We catch interesting glimpses of Cervantes in the last phase. He has left a verbal portrait of himself as he looked when he was sixty-six, and it is the only authentic portrait of him in existence. He was ‘of aquiline features, with chestnut hair, smooth and unclouded brow, bright eyes, and a nose arched, though well proportioned, silver beard, once golden twenty years ago, long moustache, small mouth, teeth of no consequence, since he had only six and these in ill condition and worse placed, inasmuch as they do not correspond to one another; stature about the average, neither tall nor short, ruddy complexion, fair rather than dark, slightly stooped in the shoulders, and not very active on his feet.’ Two years later Noel Brûlart de Sillery came to Madrid on a special mission from the French Court, and his suite were intensely curious to hear what they could of Cervantes; they learned that he was ‘old, a soldier, a gentleman, and poor.’ At this time, his health must have begun to fail: it was undoubtedly failing fast while he wrote Persiles y Sigismunda. He was apparently dependent on the bounty of Lemos and of Bernardo de Sandoval, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo. The hand of death was on him when he wrote to the Cardinal on March 26, 1616, a letter expressing his gratitude for a recent benefaction. On April 2 he was professed as a Tertiary of St. Francis, and the profession took place at the house in the Calle de León to which he had removed in 1611 or earlier. He was never to leave it again alive: on April 18 he received Extreme Unction; on April 19 he wrote the celebrated dedication of Persiles y Sigismunda to Lemos; on April 23 he died, and on April 24 he was buried in the convent of the Trinitarian nuns in the Calle del Humilladero—the street which now bears the name of his great rival Lope. His wife outlived him by ten years, and his daughter by thirty-six; we hear no more of his granddaughter after 1608. Presumably she died in infancy: if so, the family became extinct upon the death of Isabel de Saavedra in 1652.
Cervantes was no bloodless ascetic, no incarnation of dreary righteousness: we do him wrong, if we present him in that crude, intolerable light. With some defects of character and with some lapses of conduct, he is a more interesting and more attractive personality than if he were—what perhaps no one has ever been—a bundle of almost impossible perfections. He was even as we are, but far nobler—braver, more resigned to disappointment, more patient with the folly which springs eternal in each of us. This inexhaustible sympathy, even more than his splendid genius, is the secret of his conquering charm. He is one of ourselves, only incomparably greater.
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, ‘This was a man.’
But it is not for us to write his epitaph. He needs no marble sepulchre, and he has none, for the precise spot where he rests is unknown. He has built himself a lordlier and more imperishable monument than we could fashion for him—a monument which will endure so long as humour, wisdom, and romance enchant mankind.
CHAPTER VI
THE WORKS OF CERVANTES
The best and wisest of men have their delusions—especially with respect to themselves and their capabilities—and Cervantes was not free from such natural infirmities. He made his first appearance in literature with a sonnet addressed to Philip II.’s third wife, Isabel de Valois, and as this poem is not included in any Spanish edition of his works, I make no apology for quoting it (in an English version by Norman MacColl which has not yet been published).