Cervantes strikes the characteristic notes of devotion, patriotism, and loyalty to his sovereign. Though he vastly enlarged the circle of his themes later on, he was sufficiently representative of his own time and country to introduce these three motives into his subsequent writings whenever a plausible occasion offered. This is particularly notable in his fugitive verses. Sainte-Beuve says that nearly all men are born poets, but that, as a rule, the poet in us dies young. It was not so with Cervantes—so far as impulse was concerned. From youth to old age he was a persistent versifier. As we have seen, he first appeared in print with elegiacs on the death of Isabel de Valois; as a slave in Algiers he dedicated sonnets to Bartolomeo Ruffino, and from Algiers also he appealed for help to Mateo Vázquez in perhaps the most spirited and sincere of his poetical compositions; he was not long free from slavery when he supplied Juan Rufo Gutiérrez with a resounding patriotic sonnet, and Pedro de Padilla with devotional poems. As he began, so he continued. He has made merry at the practice of issuing books with eulogistic prefatory poems; but he observed the custom in his own Galatea, and he was indefatigable in furnishing such verses to his friends. All subjects came alike to him. He would as soon praise the quips and quillets of López Maldonado as lament the death of the famous admiral Santa Cruz, and he celebrated with equal promptitude a tragic epic on the lovers of Teruel and a technical treatise on kidney diseases. It must, I think, be allowed that Cervantes was readily stirred into song.
At the end of his career, in his mock-heroic Viage del Parnaso, he cast a backward glance at his varied achievement in literature, and, with his usual good judgment, admitted wistfully that nature had denied him the gift of poetry. As the phrase stands, and baldly interpreted, it would seem that excessive modesty had led Cervantes to underestimate his powers. He was certainly endowed with imagination, and with a beautifying vision; but, though he had the poet’s dream, he had not the faculty of verbal magic. It was not given to him to wed immortal thoughts to immortal music, and this no doubt is what he means us to understand by his ingenuous confession. His verdict is eminently just. Cervantes has occasional happy passages, even a few admirable moments, but no lofty or sustained inspiration. He recognised the fact with that transparent candour which has endeared him to mankind, not dreaming that uncritical admirers in future generations would seek to crown him with the laurel to which he formally resigned all claim. Yet we read appreciations of him as a ‘great’ poet, and we can only marvel at such misuse of words. If Cervantes be a ‘great’ poet, what adjective is left to describe Garcilaso, Luis de León, Lope de Vega, Góngora and Calderón?
A sense of measure, of relative values, is the soul of criticism, and we may be appreciative without condescending to idolatry, or even to flattery. Cervantes was a rapid, facile versifier, and at rare intervals his verses are touched with poetry; but, for the most part, they are imitative, and no imitation, however brilliant, is a title to lasting fame. Imitation in itself is no bad sign in a beginner; it is a healthier symptom than the adoption of methods which are wilfully eccentric; but it is a provisional device, to be used solely as a means of attaining one’s originality. It cannot be said that Cervantes ever acquired a personal manner in verse: if he had, there would be far less division of opinion as to whether he is, or is not, the author of such and such poems. He finally acquired a personal manner in prose, but only after an arduous probation.
There are few traces of originality in his earliest prose work, the First Part of La Galatea, the pastoral which Cervantes never found time to finish during more than thirty years. I do not think we need suppose that we have lost a masterpiece, though no doubt it would be profoundly interesting to see Cervantes trying to pour new wine into old bottles. The sole interest of the Galatea, as we have it, is that it is the first essay in fiction of a great creator who has mistaken his road. There does appear to have existed, long before the composition of the Homeric poems, a primitive pastoral which was popular in character. So historians tell us, and no doubt they are right. But the extant pastoral poetry of Sicily is the latest manifestation of Greek genius, an artistic revolt against the banal conventions of civilisation, an attempt to express a longing for a freer life in a purer air. In other words it is an artificial product. The Virgilian eclogues are still more remote from reality than the idyls of Theocritus: as imitations are bound to be. Artificiality is even more pronounced in the Arcadia of Sannazaro who ‘prosified’ the Virgilian eclogue during the late Renaissance: what else do you expect in an imitation of an imitation? Neither in Sannazaro, nor in his disciple Cervantes, is there a glimpse of real shepherds, nor even of the Theocritean shepherds,—
Such as sat listening round Apollo’s pipe,
When the great deity, for earth too ripe,
Let his divinity o’erflowing die
In music, through the vales of Thessaly.
What we find in the Galatea is the imitation by Cervantes of Sannazaro’s prose imitation of Virgil’s imitation of Theocritus. To us who wish for nothing better than to read Cervantes himself, his ambition to write like somebody else seems misplaced, not to say grotesque. But then, for most of us, Sannazaro has only a relative importance: to Cervantes, Sannazaro was almost Virgil’s peer.
Everything connected with the Galatea is imitative—the impulse to write it, the matter, and the manner. The Galatea is no spontaneous product of the author’s fancy; it owes its existence to Sannazaro’s Arcadia, and to the early Spanish imitations of the Arcadia recorded in Professor Rennert’s exhaustive monograph. We shall not be far wrong in thinking that it might never have struggled into print, had not Cervantes been encouraged by the example of his friend Luis Gálvez de Montalvo, who had made a hit with El Pastor de Fílida. So, too, as regards the matter of the Galatea. The sixth book is a frank adaptation of the Arcadia; there are further reminiscences of Sannazaro’s pastoral in both the verse and the prose of the Galatea; other allusions are worked in without much regard to their appropriateness; León Hebreo is not too lofty, nor Alonso Pérez too lowly, to escape Cervantes’s depredations. Lastly, the manner is no less imitative: construction, arrangement, distribution, diction are all according to precedent. Martínez Marina, indeed, held the odd view that there was something new in the style of the Galatea, and that Cervantes and Mariana were the first to move down the steep slope that leads to culteranismo. During the hundred years that Martínez Marina’s theory has been before the world it has made no converts, and therefore it needs no refutation. But, though the theory is mistaken, some of the facts advanced to support it are indubitable: the Galatea is deliberately latinised in imitation of Sannazaro who sought to reproduce the sustained and sonorous melody of the Ciceronian period. So intent is Cervantes upon the model that his own personality is overwhelmed. He probably never wrote with more scrupulous care than when at work on the Galatea, yet all his pains and all his elaborate finish are so much labour lost. Briefly, the Galatea is little more than the echo of an echo, and the individual quality of Cervantes’s voice is lost amid the reverberations of exotic music.