The Life of Cervantes

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA occupies an isolated and unique position among the great ones of Spanish history. As Columbus stands for the genius of discovery, Cervantes, in the mind of the civilised world, is analogous with Spanish literature. Mendoza and Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina or Calderon are but shadows beside the reality of Cervantes as a living force in letters. The record of Spain’s military glory is gemmed with a cluster of such names as those of the Cid and the Duke of Parma, of Boabdil, and Spinola; its sea fame rests upon the records of a long roll of mighty admirals. In art, Velasquez shares precedence with Murillo, and Ribera and Goya are worthy of a place in the same gallery; and while in song there is no national composer to associate Spain with the music of Europe, in the literary firmament the star of Cervantes rises in single splendour, and obscures all lesser luminaries.

Viewed in another and more personal light, Cervantes is still found to be “without like or similar;” in himself, as in his work, he retains his peculiar solitariness. He may not rank equal with Shakespeare and Homer, Dante and Milton, Balzac and Molière, among the giants of literature; but as soldier and author he has a double claim upon the admiration and regard of posterity. Edmund Spencer and Walter Raleigh sustained the dual rôle with distinction; but the one is now only known for his poetry, and the other lives only by virtue of his military exploits. If Cervantes had not written Don Quixote, his literary worth would never have been recognised; but his name would yet have been preserved to us as “the man of Lepanto” and the captive of Algiers. That he survived his wounds and captivity, his poverty and persecution, to publish in his fifty-ninth year a work which Dr. Johnson esteemed the greatest book in the world after the Iliad, is not less remarkable than the fact that his whole career, with all his varied and unrelieved vicissitudes, was necessary for its composition.

Under Philip II., Spain was at the zenith of her glory, and her hardly-won and short-lived supremacy was already on the wane. At a time when Spain was a nest of singing birds, the youthful Cervantes won his spurs as a poet—Navarrete regards him as among “the most celebrated poets of the nation”—and in an era when valour was the profession of the nation, he was esteemed one of the most valorous soldiers of his day. Subsequently he became “probably the first man of genius since the revival of learning who made an attempt to earn a livelihood by his pen,” and his enterprise was rewarded with penury and imprisonment. The character of the man, whom we have learnt to revere as an unappreciated genius, an unhonoured soldier, and an unrecognised martyr for the Christian faith, has been finely summed up for us by his Spanish biographer, Aribau, in the following vivid passage: “Fearless in peril, strong in adversity, modest in triumph, careless and generous in his own concerns, delighting in conferring favours, indulgent to the well-meant efforts of mediocrity, endowed with a sound and very clear judgment, of an imagination without example in its fecundity—he passed through the world as a stranger whose language was not understood. His contemporaries knew him not, but regarded him with indifference. Posterity has given him but tardy compensation. It has recognised him as a man who went before his age, who divined the tastes and tendencies of another society; and, making himself popular with his inexhaustible graces, announced the dawn of a civilisation which broke long afterwards.”

Miguel de Cervantes came of a good, if not noble family, which traced its origin back to the tenth century. Poverty, as he himself has said, may cloud, but cannot wholly obscure nobility; and although his parents appear to have possessed an indifferent share of this world’s goods, they ranked among the hidalgos of Alcala de Henares, in New Castile, where Miguel was born, in 1547. To-day Alcala is a dull, featureless little town, decaying by the sleepy waters of the Henares, memorable only by reason of the mighty names which are associated with its history. Here Charles V. entertained his royal prisoner Francis I.; here Francisco Ximenes de Cisneros, in 1510, founded its university; and, in 1517, superintended the printing of the Complutensian Bible, which was produced at a cost of 80,000 ducats; and here the body of the great Cardinal Statesman lies beneath a princely monument in the Colégio Mayor.