Virgin Spain

by Waldo David Frank

Semitism in its several shades, or a spirit close to it, impeded Spain from becoming wholly medieval. It was culturally too strong to accept the neo-platonic House of the medieval God. But Semitism is politically weak. Medievalism, repugning the natural body of the world, creates an ideal Organism—a Church—which becomes politically real. Semitism, accepting Nature as God’s organic body, has no impulse to erect political substitutes for the wholeness of existence. Politically, it tends toward fragmentation: even as in art it remains lyrical and forms no such organic structures as the Gothic cathedral or the Dantean epic. This political weakness of the Spanish Semite impeded Spain from becoming wholly Semitic. Spain for centuries was in a state of continuous flux and of osmosis between the medieval north and the Semitic south. When at length there came a final issue the north won. Ferdinand and Isabel turned toward Europe. A revised medievalism, equipped with methods of the Renaissance, became the goal of the Spanish will. And at a time when it was already dead in Europe.

This is the year 1500. The Holy Roman Empire is in full liquidation. Luther and Calvin are rising. Copernicus is at work. America has been discovered. Now Spain pours her ideal energy and her blood into the tragic task of becoming medieval. Godefroi, Saint Louis, Parzival, Saint Francis and Aquinas have been dethroned and denied in the countries of their birth. They become the patterns and movers of Castile.

Lest the hostile—the Semitic elements, which in the noon of medieval Europe held Spain from her part in that great Synthesis, hold Spain back now, Isabel drives the Jew and Moslem from her realms. It is too late. The dissident spirit is at work in Spain. And the heroic effort of this land to revive chivalry, to recreate Christ, to re-establish all the world as Christ’s Rock and Church becomes a divine farce, a sort of comic Mystery—Don Quixote.

. . . . . .

Perhaps Cervantes’ family was of gentle blood: but it had come to pitiful fortune when Miguel was born to the poor surgeon in Alcalá de Henares. The year was 1547: and the town upon the llanura of Castile was the rival of Salamanca. Naught is more eloquent of the poverty of his people than the fact that Miguel was unable to attend the university round the corner. At twenty-two, however, he was a poet. He went to Italy as the body servant of the Papal Nuncio: later he rose to be a soldier. In 1571, the ships of Philip II defeated the Turk in the waters of Lepanto. A shot crippled the left hand of Cervantes. His officers ordered him below. He refused to leave the deck, and in his blood and pain fought to the close of the engagement. This is a better sign of his unusual nature than his verse. A man of high sensitivity, he exposed himself to physical suffering beyond the duty of a soldier. He was devoted passionately to the Catholic cause. And when in 1575 he took ship from Italy, he had letters to the king from Don Juan of Austria and the Duke of Sessa whom he had served in Naples. He was full of merit: and full of hope he went home for his reward. But the Berber pirates took the vessel and he and his brother, Rodrigo, became slaves in Algiers. Four times in five years Cervantes plotted to escape the stiflement of servitude in the Kasbah of that town which rises within a snow-crowned conch above the hard-blue sea, hiding its reek within the gleam of roofs. Cervantes’ sisters and mother bestirred themselves: scraped coin together, borrowed, and at last, ransomed Rodrigo. In 1580, a mendicant monk came to the aid of the sisters, and Cervantes was freed on the eve of his departure eastward. He went to Madrid. He sought protection, and he failed to find it. He had been a hero and a martyr: but such were cheap in Spain. The land swarmed with veterans of the wars which had spread Spain’s glory to the Pacific Ocean. Cervantes performed odd diplomatic jobs and tried to be a writer. From thirty-four to forty he wrote thirty plays; he had no financial success. But he wed a landed lady, Doña Catalina de Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano of Esquivias, a town on the fringe of the Manchegan desert which after twenty years was to be transfigured by a hero. At about the time of his marriage, another lady Doña Ana de Rojas bore him a natural daughter, Isabel, whose life was to be fateful in his own. Cervantes’ burdens were great as his means were small. He placed all his hopes on a novel in which he believed that he had lavished all his genius. La Galatea appeared in 1585, and was an unremunerative succès d’estime.

Now come twenty years of Gethsemane to Don Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra. The silence of oblivion—el silencio del olvido whereof he speaks—was their sweetest portion. We follow him hardly, for he had reason to hold to his obscurity. In 1588 he is a commissary in Seville. In 1592 he is in prison for a bungled sale of wheat. Later he is engaged in provisioning the Armada. He tries to get out of Spain: he seeks a post in Guatemala: but he lacks the influence to win it. Once more he sues the stage. Lope de Vega is the master of taste; and once more Cervantes fails. In 1594 he is a tax-collector in Granada: in disgrace: once more in prison. In 1597 we find him released on faith of his word that he will make good a deficit to the Treasury of the King. There is no trace, however, of his payment. For five years, he seems to have touched depths in Andalusia. An obscure actor, Tomás Gutiérrez (blessèd be his name) supports him. In 1603 he is in jail again, the bank in which he had deposited trusted monies having failed. He appears to have been under lock and key at this time, in both Seville and Argamasilla de Alba. This may have been the circumstance in which, judged by his own words, he began to write Don Quixote.

In 1604, Part One of the work is written: has even been bruited about Madrid either in manuscript or in an edition prior to the first extant one which bears the date 1605. Lope de Vega is at his height. He is the Stage of Spain. His name outshines the king’s: his portrait stands beside a saint’s in myriad Spanish homes. Miguel de Cervantes is living in Vallodolid. With him are the two sisters who helped ransom him from slavery, a niece and Isabel; his natural daughter. His wife lives in indifferent ease on her estate in La Mancha. Cervantes is penniless. His labors as tax-farmer have earned him bread in prison and disgrace with the world. He has been forgotten as a writer. And he lives with women who support him. They are good women and he loves them: but they are women, like himself disgraced by fortune. His sisters, Magdalena de Sotomayor and Andrea de Cervantes, have been “kept” women. His niece Constanza is living now with a man to whom she is not married. Cervantes knows this, and eats their bread. His daughter, Isabel, is not of good repute; nor is Cervantes perfectly cleared of implication in her mercenary ways.

He is fifty-seven: he is broken utterly. And his bread is shame. Yet he is still the proud hidalgo who served Don Juan of Austria in Naples, who refused succor and relief at Lepanto: who led gallant sallies in Algiers. He is not Cervantes. He is Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra.

. . . . . .

This man looks out upon his world, with eyes of such a life, and decides, after twenty adverse years, again to write a book. He has read only the decadent offspring of chivalry’s literary flower. He does not know the original chansons de geste nor the native water-clear romans d’aventure. The best he knows is the fifteenth century Romancero; is Ariosto and the ornate Italians; is the Castilian version of Amadís de Gaula which has come to Spain, over-blown, by Portugal out of Brittany and Wales. These are relatively pure beside their spawn of dull sons performing ridiculous wonders in a world of wooden magic. But the vogue of these knights is past. The books of caballería, which tempted the young Santa Teresa to go forth seeking martyrdom and adventure, have already ebbed. On the other hand, La Celestina which appeared along with the first Castilian Amadis has thriven and inspired the pícaro who lives still in Spanish and in European letters.