Nor are León Hebreo and Sannazaro Cervantes's sole creditors. The Canto de Calíope, which commemorates the merits of a hundred poets and poetasters, was probably suggested by the Canto de Turia in the third book of Gil Polo's Diana enamorada, or by the list of rhymers in Boscán's Octava Rima, or even by a similar catalogue interpolated in the thirty-eighth canto of Luis Zapata's unreadable epic, Carlos famoso.[65] It may be pleaded for Cervantes that he admired Boscán, Gil Polo, and Zapata, and that his imitation of them is natural enough. Sea muy enhorabuena. The same explanation cannot apply to the uncanny resemblance, which Professor Rennert[66] has pointed out, between the address to Nisida in the third book of the Galatea and the letter to Cardenia in the second book of Alonso Pérez' worthless sequel to Montemôr's Diana. Had Cervantes remembered this small loan when writing the sixth chapter of Don Quixote, gratitude would probably have led him to pass a more lenient sentence on the impudent Salamancan doctor.
It was in strict accordance with the pastoral tradition that the author should introduce himself and his friends into his story. In Virgil's Fifth Eclogue, Daphnis was said to stand for Julius Cæsar, Mopsus for Æmilius Macer of Verona, Menalcas for the poet himself. Sannazaro had, it was believed, revived the fashion in Italy.[67] Ribeiro presented himself to the public as Bimnardel, Montemôr asked for sympathy under the name of Sireno, and Sir Philip Sidney masqueraded as Pyrocles. In the Pastor de Fílida, it is understood that Mendino is Don Enrique de Mendoza y Aragón, that Pradileo is the Conde de Prades (Luis Ramón y Folch), that Silvano is the poet Gregorio Silvestre, that Tirsi is Francisco de Figueroa (or, as some rashly say,[68] Cervantes), and that Montalvo himself appears as Siralvo. The new recruit observed the precedents and, if we are to accept the authority of Navarrete,[69] the Tirsi, Damon, Meliso, Siralvo, Lauso, Larsileo, and Artidoro of the Galatea are pseudonyms for Francisco de Figueroa, Pedro Láinez, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Luis Gálvez de Montalvo, Luis Barahona de Soto, Alonso de Ercilla, and Andrés Rey de Artieda respectively.[70] Lastly, commentators and biographers are mostly agreed that the characters of Elicio and Galatea stand for Cervantes and for Doña Catalina de Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano[71] whom he married some ten months after the official Aprobación to his novel was signed. We know on Cervantes's own statement that many of his shepherds were shepherds in appearance only,[72] and Lope de Vega confirms the tradition;[73] but we shall do well to remember that, in attempting to identify the characters of a romance with personages in real life, conjecture plays a considerable part.[74] Some of the above identifications might easily be disputed, and, at the best, we can scarcely doubt that most of the likenesses given by Cervantes in the Galatea are composite portraits.
In any case, it is difficult to take a deep interest in Cervantes's seventy-one[75] shepherds and shepherdesses. Their sensibility is too exquisite for this world. Among the swains, Lisandro, Silenio, Mireno, Grisaldo, Erastro, Damon, Telesio, Lauso, and Lenio weep most copiously. Among the nymphs, Galatea, Lidia, Rosaura, Teolinda, Maurisa, Nisida and Blanca choke with tears. Teolinda, Leonarda and Rosaura swoon; Silerio, Timbrio, Darinto, Elicio and Lenio drop down in a dead faint. In mind and body these shepherds and shepherdesses are exceptionally endowed. They can remain awake for days. They can recite, without slurring a comma, a hundred or two hundred lines of a poem heard once, years ago; and the casuistry of their amorous dialectics would do credit to Sánchez or Escobar. All this is common form. A generation later, Honoré d'Urfé replied to the few who might accuse Astrée of talking above her station:—"Reponds-leur, ma Bergere, que pour peu qu'ils ayent connoissance de toy, ils sçauront que tu n'es pas, ny celles aussi qui te suiuent, de ces Bergeres necessiteuses qui pour gagner leur vie conduisent les troupeaux aux pasturages: mais que vous n'auez toutes pris cette condition que pour viure plus doucement & sans contrainte. Que si vos conceptions & vos paroles estoient veritablement telles que celles des Bergers ordinaires, ils auroient aussi peu de plaisir de vous escouter que vous auriez beaucoup de honte à les redire."[76] The plea was held to be good. The pastoral convention of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thrust out all realism as an unclean thing. The pity is that Cervantes, in his effort to conform to the rule, was compelled to stifle what was best and rarest in his genius. Yet, amid these philosophizings and artificialities, a few gleams of his peculiar, parenthetical humour flash from him unawares: as when the refined Teolinda seeks to console Lidia—limpiándole los ojos con la manga de mi camisa:[77] or in the description of Crisalvo's fury—que le sacaba de juicio, aunque él tenía tan poco, que poco era menester para acabárselo: or in Arsindo's thoughtful remark that the shepherds might possibly be missed by the flocks from which they had been absent for the last ten days. Again, there is a foreshadowing of a famous passage in Don Quixote when the writer compares the shepherd's life with the courtier's. Once more, the story of Timbrio's adventures—which are anything but idyllic—is given with uncommon spirit. There are ingenuity and fancy in many of the poems, and there is interest as well as grace in the little autobiographical touches—the mention of Arnaute Mamí, the local patriotism that surges up in allusions to the river Henares on which stands the author's native town—el gran Compluto, as he says in his eloquent way.
Cervantes is admittedly a wonderful creator; but the pastoral of his time—a pastiche or mosaic of conventional figures—gave him no opportunity of displaying his powers as an inventor. He is also a very great prose-writer, ranging with an easy mastery from the loftiest rhetoric to the quick thrust-and-parry of humoristic colloquy. Still, as has often been remarked, his attention is apt to wander, and vigilant grammarians have detected (and chronicled) slips in his most brilliant chapters. In the matter of correctness, the Galatea compares favourably with Don Quixote, and its style has been warmly eulogized by the majority of critics. And, on the whole, the praise is deserved. The Galatea is (one fancies) the result of much deliberation—the preliminary essay of a writer no longer young indeed, but abounding in hope, in courage, and in knowledge of the best literary models which his country had produced. The First Part of Don Quixote was dashed off at odds and ends of time by a man acquainted with rebuffs, poverty, disastrous failure of every kind. Purists may point to five grammatical flaws in Don Quixote for one in the Galatea, and naturally the latter gains by this comparison. But, whatever the technical weaknesses of Don Quixote, that book has the supreme merit of allowing Cervantes to be himself. In the Galatea he is, so far as his means allow, Virgil, Longus, Boccaccio, Petrarch, León Hebreo, Sannazaro, Montemôr—even the unhappy Pérez—every one, in fact, but himself. Hence, in the very nature of things, the smoothly filed periods of this first romance cease to be characteristic of the writer, and have even led some to charge him with being a corrupter of the language, a culto before culteranismo was invented.[78]
The charm of Cervantes's style, at its best, lies in its spontaneity, strength, variety, swiftness, and noble simplicity: it is the unrestrained expression of his most original and seductive personality. In the Galatea, on the other hand, Cervantes is too often an echo, a timid copyist, reproducing the accepted clichés with an exasperating scrupulousness. Galatea is discreta, Silvia is discreta, Teolinda is discreta: Lisandro is discreto, Artidoro is discreto, Damon is discreto. The noun and its regulation epithet are never sundered from each other. And verde—the eternal adjective verde—haunts the distracted reader like an obsession: the verdes árboles, the verde suelo, the verde yerba, the verde prado, the verde carga, the verde llano, the verde parra, the verde laurel, the verdes ramos,—and even verdes ojos.[79] A hillock is espeso: a wood is espeso. One may choose between verdadero y honesto amor and perfeto y verdadero amor. Beauty is extremada: grace or wit is extremada: a good voice is extremada. And infinito sparkles on almost every second page. It is all, of course, extremely correct and in accord with a hundred thousand precedents. But, since the charm palls after incessant repetition, it would not be surprising if some should think that such undeviating fidelity to a model is not an unmixed good, that tame academic virtues may be bought too dear, and that a single chapter of that sadly incorrect book, Don Quixote, is worth a whole wilderness of impeccable pastorals.