by Will Durant
Cervantes pictures him as an imaginative country gentleman—ingenioso hidalgo—so bemused by the fiction that he has accumulated in his library that he arms himself cap-a-pie in knightly costume and sallies forth on his Rozinante to defend the oppressed, to right iniquities, and to protect virginity and innocence. He hates injustice, and dreams of a golden past when there was no gold, when “those two fatal words, thine and mine, were distinctions unknown; all things were in common in that holy age … all then was union, all love and friendship in the world.”22 As chivalric custom requires, he dedicates his arms, nay, his life, to a lady, La Dulcinea del Toboso. Never having seen her, he can picture her as the perfection of demure purity and gentle grace. “Her neck is alabaster, her breasts are marble, her hands are ivory; and snow would lose its whiteness near her bosom.”23 Hardened with this marble and warmed with this snow, Don Quixote moves to attack a world of wrongs. In this battle against great odds he does not feel outnumbered, for “I alone am worth a hundred.” As Cervantes keeps him company through inns and windmills, filthy ditches and stampeding swine, he comes to love the “Knight of the Woeful Figure” as a saint as well as a madman; in all those misadventures and painful falls the Don remains the soul of courtesy, compassion, and generosity. At last the somber lunatic is transformed by his author into a philosopher who, even in the mud, talks kindly good sense and forgives the world that he cannot understand; and we begin to take offense when, to hew to his charted line, Cervantes continues to dash him to the ground. We feel for the disillusioned knight when Sancho assures him that the only Dulcinea del Toboso known to her town is “a strapping wench … a sizable, sturdy, manly lass” of lowly stock. The knight answers him with a golden phrase, “Virtue ennobles the blood.”24“Every man,” he tells Sancho, “is the son of his own works.”25
What the Don lacks is humor, which is the better half of philosophy. Therefore Cervantes gives him, as an attendant squire, a sturdy town laborer and son of the soil, Sancho Panza. The knight secures his services by promising him food and drink, and the governorship of some province in the realms they are to conquer. Sancho is a man of simple sense and hearty appetite, who, though always on the verge of starvation, remains fat to the last page; a kindly fellow, who loves his mule as his alter ego and values its “sweet company.” He is not a typical Spanish peasant, for he is long on humor and short on dignity; but, like any Spaniard free from theological rabies, he is goodhearted and charitable, wise without letters, and faithful to his master this side of flagellation. He soon concludes that the Don is mad, but he too comes to love him. “I have stuck close to my good master and kept him company this many a month,” he says toward the end, “and now he and I are all one.”26 It is true, for they are two sides of one humanity. The knight in his turn comes to respect the wisdom of his squire as better rooted, if not as noble, as his own. Sancho expresses his philosophy through proverbs, which he strings end to end almost to the suffocation of his thought: “A hen and a woman are lost by rambling”; “Between a woman’s yea and nay I would not engage to put a pin’s point, so close they be to one another”; “A doctor gives his advice by the pulse of your pocket”; “Everyone is as God made him, and often worse.”27 Cervantes probably used an anthology of such proverbs, which he defined as “short sentences framed on long experience.”28 Sancho excuses his adagiorrhea on the ground that these saws clog his windpipe and must fly out, “first come, first served.” The Don resigns himself to the flood. “In faith,” he says, “it would seem that thou art no saner than I am … I pronounce thee noncompos; I pardon thee, and have done.”29
The success of Don Quixote brought Cervantes two patrons, the Count of Lemos and the Cardinal of Toledo, who gave him a small pension; now he could support his wife, his natural daughter, his widowed sister, and a niece. A few months after the publication of his book he and his whole family were arrested for possible complicity in the murder of Gaspar de Ezpeleta at Cervantes’ door. Gossip said that Gaspar had loved the daughter, but inquiry proved nothing, and all were released.
Leisurely Cervantes proceeded with Part Two of Don Quixote. In 1613 he interrupted this fond labor by publishing twelve Novelas ejemplares. “I have given these stories the title of Exemplary,” said the preface, “and if you look closely there is not one of them that does not offer a useful example.”30 The first is of a gang of thieves operating in exemplary unison with the constable of Seville; another (Colloquy of the Dogs) describes the manners and morals of that city. In the Prologue to the Novelas Cervantes pictured himself:
The man you see here with the acquiline countenance, the chestnut hair, the smooth, untroubled brow, the bright eyes, the hooked yet well-proportioned nose, the silvery beard that less than a score of years ago was golden, the big mustache … the teeth that are scarcely worth counting … the body of medium height … the slightly stooping shoulders, the somewhat heavy build—this, I may tell you, is the author of Galatea and Don Quixote de la Mancha.31
He was surprised in 1614 by the appearance of Part Two of Don Quixote, not by himself but by an unidentified poacher who took the name of Avellaneda. The preface made fun of Cervantes’ wounds, and rejoiced at the neat trick that would ruin Cervantes’ own Part Two. The harassed author hurried to finish his continuation and published it in 1615. Literate Spain was delighted to find this extension of remarks quite up to the first part in imagination, vigor, and humor; through these additional half-thousand pages the interest was kept up to the sad if not bitter end; and the mishaps of the Don and his squire at the court of the Duke, the reign of Sancho over his province, and the painful tale of his beaten buttocks seemed to some to make the second the better half. When Sancho is made governor of Barataria everyone expects him to surpass all records of gubernatorial fatuity. On the contrary, his good heart and common sense, his simple and just regulations and reforms, and his wise decision in a case of rape32 put to shame the actualities of contemporary government. But the forces of heartless evil are too strong for him; finally they harass him to the point where he surrenders his office and returns with relief to his life as squire to the Don.
It remains only for the knight to make a similar escape from dreams to fact. He sets out for new adventures, but meets with a culminating defeat, in which the victor exacts from him a pledge that he will go home and live for a year in unknightly peace. The tired warrior consents, but his disillusionment dries up the sources of his life. He calls his friends to his bedside, distributes gifts, makes his will, disavows knight-errantry, and lets his spirit doubly ebb away. Sancho goes back to his family, and cultivates his garden in the content of a man who has seen enough of the world to appreciate his home. In the end his good-natured realism appears to triumph over the generous but fanciful idealism of his master. But it is not quite so. The soul of the knight has the last word, in the epitaph that he left for his tomb: “If I did not accomplish great things, I died in their pursuit.” The realist survives till his death, but the idealist then begins to live.
In the year that remained to him Cervantes published eight plays; time has not confirmed his estimate of them, but has given high rank to his La Numancia, a dramatic poem of power and beauty, celebrating the resistance of that Spanish city to Roman siege (133 B.C.). Like his knight he had his sustaining delusion; he thought that posterity would honor him above all for his dramas, and he spoke with unbecoming but forgivable jealousy of the incredibly successful Lope de Vega. And with almost his last breath, after ridiculing most romances, he wrote another of his own, Pérsiles y Sigismunda. Four days before his death he dedicated it to the Count of Lemos:
Yesterday I received extreme unction, and today I pen this dedication. The time is short, my agony increases, hopes diminish … And so farewell to jesting, farewell my merry humors, farewell my gay friends; for I feel that I am dying, and have no desire but to see you happy in the other life.33
He died April 23, 1616.II
In his characteristic Quixotic way he had predicted a sale of thirty
million copies of his Don Quixote; the world smiled at his naïveté, and bought thirty million copies. The great story has been translated into more languages than any book except the Bible. In Spain the simplest villagers know about Don Quixote; and generally, again outside of the Bible, he is “the most living, the most endearing, and the best known character in all literature,”34 more real than a thousand proud notables of history. By making his story a picture of manners Cervantes established the modern novel and opened the way for Lesage, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne; and he raised the new form to philosophy by making it reveal and illuminate the moral gamut of mankind.
III. THE POETS
The masculine resonance of the Castilian tongue, like the melodious grace of Tuscan Italian, lent itself willingly to music and rhyme; and the spirit of the people responded more congenially to poetry than to prose. Poets were as plentiful as priests. In his Laurel of Apollo (1630), Lope de Vega described a feast and joust of poetry, where, in his fancy, the three hundred poets of contemporary Spain fought for the laurel crown. Such poetical contests were almost as popular with the people as the burning of heretics. There were soporific didactic poems, homilies in verse, romances in rhyme, pastoral poetry, mock-heroic poetry, ballads, lyrics, epics; and not all authors had the courage of Francisco de Figueroa, who condemned his verses to an auto-da-fé.
The best of the epics was La Araucana (1569–89), describing the revolt of an Indian tribe in South America; it was written by Alonso de Ercilla y Zuñiga, who fought with distinction as a Spanish soldier in that war. Perhaps the finest of the lyric poets was an Augustinian monk, Luis Ponce de León, whose partly Jewish ancestry did not prevent him from expressing the tenderest aspects of Christian piety. More remarkable was the union in him of poet and theologian; at thirty-four he was appointed professor of divinity at Salamanca, and he never ceased to be attached to that university; yet his scholarly pursuits and austere life did not stop his lyric flights. The Inquisition hailed him before its tribunal (1572) for translating the Song of Songs into the form of a pastoral eclogue. For five years he suffered imprisonment; released, he resumed his lectures at the university with wry words: “As we remarked when we last met …”35 He agreed with his superiors that poetry did not become a theologian; he left his verses unpublished, and they did not reach print till forty years after his death. They are by common consent the most nearly perfect productions of the Castilian tongue.
Luis de Góngora and Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Villegas were still more famous, for they stirred the air with controversy as well as rhymes, and left behind them the warring schools of gongorismo and conceptismo as philosophies of style. Cervantes, who had a good word to say for all his rivals except Lope and Avellaneda, called Góngora “a rare and lively genius, without a second.”36 We catch a distant echo of the poet’s cry of hate in this stanza from his “Ode to the Armada”:
O Island! once so Catholic, so strong,
Fortress of faith, now Heresy’s foul shrine,
Camp of train’d war, and Wisdom’s sacred school;
The time hath been, such majesty was thine,
The luster of thy crown was first in song.
Now the dull weeds that spring by Stygian pool
Were fitting wreath for thee. Land of the rule
Of Arthurs, Edwards, Henries! Where are they?
Their mother where, rejoicing in their sway,
Firm in the strength of Faith? To lasting shame
Condemned, thou guilty blame
Of her who rules thee now.
O hateful Queen! so hard of heart and brow,
Wanton by turns, and cruel, fierce, and lewd,
Thou distaff on the throne, true virtue’s bane,
Wolf-like in every mood,
May Heaven’s just flame on thy false tresses rain!37
Here was a pen worth wooing. No wonder Philip IV made the fiery poet (now become a priest) his royal chaplain, binding his talents to the throne. Góngora labored to acquire polish of style and subtlety of phrase; he declared war upon such hasty writing as Lope de Vega’s, and insisted that every line should be filed and purified into a gem. In his fervor he carried art to artificiality, burdened his lines with extravagant metaphors, epithets, inversions, and antitheses, outdoing the euphuism of Lyly and the affectations of Marini. So, of a lass’s entrancing charms:
Her twin-born sun-bright eyes
Might turn to summer Norway’s wintry skies;
And the white wonder of her snowy hand
Blench with surprise the son of Ethiopian land.
Spanish poets now divided into three camps: those who followed gon-gorismo (or cultismo); those who adopted the conceptismo of Quevedo; and those who, like Lope de Vega, resisted both plagues.
At Alcalá Quevedo took honors in law, theology, Latin, Greek, French, Arabic, Hebrew, and dueling. Though he was shortsighted and clubfooted, he was a peril with both rapier and pen, and his satires were as cutting as his sword. After killing several opponents, he fled to Sicily and Naples. At thirty-five he served there as finance minister; he shared in Osuna’s plot against Venice (1618); when it failed he was imprisoned for three years. Back in Madrid, he was not silenced by a sinecure as secretary to Philip IV; his verses scalded the King, the Pope, Olivares, women, and monks. His scandalous little book El perro y la calentura—The Dog and the Fever—(1625) barked at all things, poured upon them a storm of proverbs thicker than Sancho Panza’s and sourer; and his final advice, which he never took, was to stand aside from the battle and “let the swill pass.”38 Greedy for enemies and butts, Quevedo attacked the cultismo of the gongoristas and countered it with conceptismo: instead of hunting for fanciful phrases and words, the poet should seek ideas—and not obvious notions staled with time or soiled by common use, but concepts of subtlety, grandeur, dignity, and depth.
He was wrongly charged with writing letters that warned the King to cease extravagance and dismiss incompetent ministers. He was imprisoned for four years in a damp cell; when he was freed his health was ruined, and three years later he died (1645). This was no peaceful literary career, but a life in which ink was blood and poetry was war. Ending it, he warned his country that it too was dying:
I saw the ramparts of my native land,
One time so strong, now dropping in decay,
Their strength destroyed by this new age’s way
That has worn out and rotted what was grand.
I went into the fields; there I could see
The sun drink up the waters newly thawed;
And on the hills the moaning cattle pawed;
Their miseries robbed the light of day for me.
I went into my house, I saw how spotted,
Decaying things made that old home their prize;
My withered walking-staff had come to bend;
I felt the age had won; my sword was rotted;
And there was nothing on which to set my eyes
That was not a reminder of the end.39
IV. LOPE DE VEGA: 1562–1635
The dramatists, in that lively age, were as numerous as the poets. Heretofore, as in contemporary England, the stage had been an impromptu contraption; strolling players peddled their art impecuniously in the towns; and the Inquisition, struggling to control the coarseness of their comedies, placed an interdict upon all plays (1520). When Madrid became the royal residence (1561), two troupes of actors asked the King’s permission to establish themselves permanently there. Permission was given, the ecclesiastical ban was lifted (1572), and two theaters were built, the Teatro de la Cruz and the Teatro del Príncipe—the two names expressing the main loyalties and powers of Spain. By 1602 there were theaters also in Valencia, Seville, Barcelona, Granada, Toledo, and Valladolid; by 1632 there were a thousand actors in Madrid and seventy-six dramatists in Castile; tailors, tradesmen, and shepherds were writing dramas; by 1800 Spain had heard thirty thousand different plays. No other country in history—not even Elizabethan England—had such a theatrical ec
stasy.
The form of the theater evolved from the courtyards—surrounded by houses and temporary stands—in which the earlier plays were performed; so the permanent theaters were designed as tiers of seats and boxes surrounding a corral. Costumes were Spanish, whatever the place or period of the piece. The audiences were of all classes. Women came, but sat in a special section and wore heavy veils. The actors lived in a demoralizing insecurity between famines and feasts, consoling their poverty and rootlessness with promiscuity and hopes. A few male “stars” rose to wealth and head-turning fame; they paraded the main avenues of Madrid, adjusting their swords and mustaches; and some prima donnas slept with kings.
The monarch of the Spanish stage was Lope Félix de Vega Carpio. In 1647 the Inquisition had to suppress a published credo which began: “I believe in Lope de Vega the Almighty, the poet of heaven and earth.”40 Probably no other writer in history ever enjoyed such contemporary fame; only the difficulty of translating rhymed poetry has confined that fame mostly to Spain; even so, during his lifetime his plays were performed in Spanish in Naples, Rome, and Milan; and in France and Italy his name was prefixed to plays not his, in order to lure an audience.
He was born in Madrid, two years before Shakespeare, of a poor but (we are assured) a noble family. At fourteen he ran away from home and college, enlisted in the army, and saw some bloody action in the Azores. He fell in love, but extricated himself with some minor wounds; he penned mean epigrams on the lady, was arrested for libel, was banished from Madrid. Re-entering the city secretly, he eloped with Isabel de Urbina, married her, was pursued, and, to escape the law, joined the Armada; he shared in its defeat, and his brother, killed in the battle, died in Lope’s arms. The death of his wife released him for other entanglements. He begot two children by the actress Micaela de Lujan,41 married again, became an official of the Inquisition (1609), lost his second wife, was ordained a priest (1614?), and fell into new amours.42