Castilian Days Part 10

THE CRADLE AND THE GRAVE OF CERVANTES

In Rembrandt Peale's picture of the Court of Death a cadaverous shape lies for judgment at the foot of the throne, touching at either extremity the waters of Lethe. There is something similar in the history of the greatest of Spanish writers. No man knew, for more than a century after the death of Cervantes, the place of his birth and burial. About a hundred years ago the investigations of Rios and Pellicer established the claim of Alcala de Henares to be his native city; and last year the researches of the Spanish Academy have proved conclusively that he is buried in the Convent of the Trinitarians in Madrid. But the precise spot where he was born is only indicated by vague tradition; and the shadowy conjecture that has so long hallowed the chapel and cloisters of the Calle Cantarranas has never settled upon any one slab of their pavement.

It is, however, only the beginning and the end of this most chivalrous and genial apparition of the sixteenth century that is concealed from our view. We know where he was christened and where he died. So that there are sufficiently authentic shrines in Alcala and Madrid to satisfy the most sceptical pilgrims.

I went to Alcala one summer day, when the bare fields were brown and dry in their after-harvest nudity, and the hills that bordered the winding Henares were drab in the light and purple in the shadow. From a distance the town is one of the most imposing in Castile. It lies in the midst of a vast plain by the green water-side, and the land approach is fortified by a most impressive wall emphasized by st.u.r.dy square towers and flanking bastions. But as you come nearer you see this wall is a tradition. It is almost in ruins.

The crenellated towers are good for nothing but to sketch. A short walk from the station brings you to the gate, which is well defended by a gang of picturesque beggars, who are old enough to have sat for Murillo, and revoltingly pitiable enough to be millionaires by this time, if Castilians had the cowardly habit of sponging out disagreeable impressions with pennies. At the first charge we rushed in panic into a tobacco-shop and filled our pockets with maravedis, and thereafter faced the ragged battalion with calm.

It is a fine, handsome, and terribly lonesome town. Its streets are wide, well built, and silent v as avenues in a graveyard. On every hand there are tall and stately churches, a few palaces, and some two dozen great monasteries turning their long walls, pierced with jealous grated windows, to the gra.s.s-grown streets. In many quarters there is no sign of life, no human habitations among these morose and now empty barracks of a monkish army. Some of them have been turned into military casernes, and the bright red and blue uniforms of the Spanish officers and troopers now brighten the cloisters that used to see nothing gayer than the gowns of cord-girdled friars. A large garrison is always kept here.

The convents are convenient for lodging men and horses. The fields in the vicinity produce great store of grain and alfalfa,--food for beast and rider. It is near enough to the capital to use the garrison on any sudden emergency, such as frequently happens in Peninsular politics.

The railroad that runs by Alcala has not brought with it any taint of the nineteenth century. The army is a corrupting influence, but not modern. The vice that follows the trail of armies, or sprouts, fungus-like, about the walls of barracks, is as old as war, and links the present, with its struggle for a better life, to the old mediaeval world of wrong. These trim fellows in loose trousers and embroidered jackets are the same race that fought and drank and made prompt love in Italy and Flanders and butchered the Aztecs in the name of religion three hundred years ago. They have laid off their helmets and hauberks, and use the Berdan rifle instead of the Roman spear. But they are the same careless, idle, dissolute bread-wasters now as then.

The town has not changed in the least. It has only shrunk a little. You think sometimes it must be a vacation, and that you will come again when people return. The little you see of the people is very attractive.

Pa.s.sing along the desolate streets, you glance in at an open door and see a most delightful cabinet picture of domestic life. All the doors in the house are open. You can see through the entry, the front room, into the cool court beyond, gay with oleanders and vines, where a group of women half dressed are sewing and spinning and cheering their souls with gossip. If you enter under pretence of asking a question, you will be received with grave courtesy, your doubts solved, and they will bid you go with G.o.d, with the quaint frankness of patriarchal times.

They do not seem to have been spoiled by overmuch travel. Such impressive and Oriental courtesy could not have survived the trampling feet of the great army of tourists. On our pilgrim-way to the cradle of Cervantes we came suddenly upon the superb facade of the university.

This is one of the most exquisite compositions of plateresque in existence. The entire front of the central body of the building is covered with rich and tasteful ornamentation. Over the great door is an enormous escutcheon of the arms of Austria, supported by two finely carved statues,--on the one side a nearly nude warrior, on the other the New World as a feather-clad Indian woman. Still above this a fine, bold group of statuary, representing, with that reverent naivete of early art, G.o.d the Father in the work of creation. Surrounding the whole front as with a frame, and reaching to the ground on either side, is carved the knotted cord of the Franciscan monks. No description can convey the charming impression given by the harmony of proportion and the loving finish of detail everywhere seen in this beautifully preserved f.a.gade.

While we were admiring it an officer came out of the adjoining cuartel and walked by us with jingling spurs. I asked him if one could go inside. He shrugged his shoulders with a Quien sabe? indicating a doubt as profound as if I had asked him whether chignons were worn in the moon. He had never thought of anything inside. There was no wine nor pretty girls there. Why should one want to go in? We entered the cool vestibule, and were ascending the stairs to the first court, when a porter came out of his lodge and inquired our errand. We were wandering barbarians with an eye to the picturesque, and would fain see the university, if it were not unlawful. He replied, in a hushed and scholastic tone of voice, and with a succession of confidential winks that would have inspired confidence in the heart of a Talleyrand, that if our lordships would give him our cards he had no doubt he could obtain the required permission from the rector. He showed us into a dim, claustral-looking anteroom, in which, as I was told by my friend, who trifles in lost moments with the integral calculus, there were seventy-two chairs and one microscopic table. The wall was decked with portraits of the youth of the college, all from the same artist, who probably went mad from the attempt to make fifty beardless faces look unlike each other. We sat for some time mourning over his failure, until the door opened, and not the porter, but the rector himself, a most courteous and polished gentleman in the black robe and three-cornered hat of his order, came in and graciously placed himself and the university at our disposition. We had reason to congratulate ourselves upon this good fortune. He showed us every nook and corner of the vast edifice, where the present and the past elbowed each other at every turn: here the boys' gymnasium, there the tomb of Valles; here the new patent c.o.c.ks of the water-pipes, and there the tri-lingual patio where Alonso Sanchez lectured in Arabic, Greek, and Chaldean, doubtless making a choice hash of the three; the airy and graceful paraninfo, or hall of degrees, a masterpiece of Moresque architecture, with a gorgeous panelled roof, a rich profusion of plaster arabesques, and, _horresco referens,_ the walls covered with a bright French paper. Our good rector groaned at this abomination, but said the Gauls had torn away the glorious carved panelling for firewood in the war of 1808, and the college was too poor to restore it. His righteous indignation waxed hot again when we came to the beautiful sculptured pulpit of the chapel, where all the delicate details are degraded by a thick coating of whitewash, which in some places has fallen away and shows the gilding of the time of the Catholic kings.

There is in this chapel a picture of the Virgin appearing to the great cardinal whom we call Ximenez and the Spaniards Cisneros, which is precious for two reasons. The portrait of Ximenez was painted from life by the nameless artist, who, it is said, came from France for the purpose, and the face of the Virgin is a portrait of Isabella the Catholic. It is a good wholesome face, such as you would expect. But the thin, powerful profile of Ximenez is very striking, with his red hair and florid tint, his curved beak, and long, nervous lips. He looks not unlike that superb portrait Raphael has left of Cardinal Medici.

This university is fragrant with the good fame of Ximenez. In the princ.i.p.al court there is a fine medallion of the ill.u.s.trious founder and protector, as he delighted to be drawn, with a sword in one hand and a crucifix in the other,--twin brother in genius and fortune of the soldier-priest of France, the Cardinal-Duke Richelieu. On his gorgeous sarcophagus you read the arrogant epitaph with which he revenged himself for the littleness of kings and courtiers:--

"Praetextam junxi sacco, galeamque galero, Frater, dux, praesul, cardineusque pater. Quin, virtute mea junctum est diadema cucullo, Dum mihi regnanti patuit Gesperia."

By a happy chance our visit was made in a holiday time, and the students were all away. It was better that there should be perfect solitude and silence as we walked through the n.o.ble system of buildings and strove to re-create the student world of Cervantes's time. The chronicle which mentions the visit of Francis I. to Alcala, when a prisoner in Spain, says he was received by eleven thousand students. This was only twenty years before the birth of Cervantes. The world will never see again so brilliant a throng of ingenuous youth as gathered together in the great university towns in those years of vivid and impa.s.sioned greed for letters that followed the revival of learning. The romance of Oxford or Heidelberg or Harvard is tame compared with that electric life of a new-born world that wrought and flourished in Padua, Paris, and Alcala.

Walking with my long-robed scholarly guide through the still, shadowy courts, under Renaissance arches and Moorish roofs, hearing him talking with enthusiasm of the glories of the past and never a word of the events of the present, in his pure, strong, guttural Castilian, no living thing in view but an occasional Franciscan gliding under the graceful arcades, it was not difficult to imagine the scenes of the intense young life which filled these n.o.ble halls in that fresh day of aspiration and hope, when this Spanish sunlight fell on the marble and the granite bright and sharp from the chisel of the builder, and the great Ximenez looked proudly on his perfect work and saw that it was good.

The twilight of superst.i.tion still hung heavily over Europe. But this was nevertheless the breaking of dawn, the herald of the fuller day of investigation and inquiry.

It was into this rosy morning of the modern world that Cervantes was ushered in the season of the falling leaves of 1547. He was born to a life of poverty and struggle and an immortality of fame. His own city did not know him while he lived, and now is only known through him.

Pilgrims often come from over distant seas to breathe for one day the air that filled his baby lungs, and to muse among the scenes that shaped his earliest thoughts.

We strolled away from the university through the still lanes and squares to the Calle Mayor, the only thoroughfare of the town that yet retains some vestige of traffic. It is a fine, long street bordered by stone arcades, within which are the shops, and without which in the pleasant afternoon are the rosy and contemplative shopkeepers. It would seem a pity to disturb their dreamy repose by offering to trade; and in justice to Castilian taste and feeling I must say that n.o.body does it. Halfway down the street a side alley runs to the right, called Calle de Cervantes, and into this we turned to find the birthplace of the romancer. On one side was a line of squalid, quaint, gabled houses, on the other a long garden wall. We walked under the shadow of the latter and stared at the house-fronts, looking for an inscription we had heard of. We saw in sunny doorways mothers oiling into obedience the stiff horse-tail hair of their daughters. By the grated windows we caught glimpses of the black eyes and nut-brown cheeks of maidens at their needles. But we saw nothing to show which of these mansions had been honored by tradition as the residence of Roderick Cervantes.

A brisk and practical-looking man went past us.

I asked him where was the house of the poet. He smiled in a superior sort of way, and pointed to the wall above my head: "There is no such house. Some people think it once stood here, and they have placed that stone in the garden-wall to mark the spot. I believe what I see. It is all child's play anyhow, whether true or false. There is better work to be done now than to honor Cervantes. He fought for a bigot king, and died in a monk's hood."

"You think lightly of a glory of Castile."

"If we could forget all the glories of Castile it would be better for us."

"Puede ser," I a.s.sented. "Many thanks. May your grace go with G.o.d!"

"Health and fraternity!" he answered, and moved away with a step full of energy and dissent. He entered a door under an inscription, "Federal Republican Club."

Go your ways, I thought, radical brother. You are not so courteous nor so learned as the rector. But this Peninsula has need of men like you.

The ages of belief have done their work for good and ill. Let us have some years of the spirit that denies, and asks for proofs. The power of the monk is broken, but the work is not yet done. The convents have been turned into barracks, which is no improvement. The ringing of spurs in the streets of Alcala is no better than the rustling of the sandalled friars. If this Republican party of yours cannot do something to free Spain from the triple curse of crown, crozier, and sabre, then Spain is in doleful case. They are at last divided, and the first two have been sorely weakened in detail. The last should be the easiest work.

The scorn of my radical friend did not prevent my copying the modest tablet on the wall:--

"Here was born Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, author of Don Quixote. By his fame and his genius he belongs to the civilized world; by his cradle to Alcala de Henares."

There is no doubt of the truth of the latter part of this inscription.

Eight Spanish towns have claimed to have given birth to Cervantes, thus beating the blind Scian by one town; every one that can show on its church records the baptism of a child so called has made its claim. Yet Alcala, who spells his name wrong, calling him Carvantes, is certainly in the right, as the names of his father, mother, brothers, and sisters are also given in its records, and all doubt is now removed from the matter by the discovery of Cervantes's ma.n.u.script statement of his captivity in Algiers and his pet.i.tion for employment in America, in both of which he styles himself "Natural de Alcala de Henares."

Having examined the evidence, we considered ourselves justly ent.i.tled to all the usual emotions in visiting the church of the parish, Santa Maria la Mayor. It was evening, and from a dozen belfries in the neighborhood came the soft dreamy chime of silver-throated bells. In the little square in front of the church a few families sat in silence on the ma.s.sive stone benches. A few beggars hurried by, too intent upon getting home to supper to beg. A rural and a twilight repose lay on everything.

Only in the air, rosy with the level light, flew out and greeted each other those musical voices of the bells rich with the memories of all the days of Alcala. The church was not open, but we followed a sacristan in, and he seemed too feeble-minded to forbid. It is a pretty church, not large nor imposing, with a look of cosy comfort about it. Through the darkness the high altar loomed before us, dimly lighted by a few candles where the sacristans were setting up the properties for the grand ma.s.s of the morrow,--Our Lady of the Snows. There was much talk and hot discussion as to the placing of the boards and the draperies, and the image of Our Lady seemed unmoved by words unsuited to her presence. We know that every vibration of air makes its own impression on the world of matter. So that the curses of the sacristans at their work, the prayers of penitents at the altar, the wailing of breaking hearts bowed on the pavement through many years, are all recorded mysteriously, in these rocky walls. This church is the illegible history of the parish. But of all its ringing of bells, and swinging of censers, and droning of psalms, and putting on and off of goodly raiment, the only show that consecrates it for the world's pilgrimage is that humble procession that came on the 9th day of October, in the year of Grace 1547, to baptize Roderick Cervantes's youngest child. There could not be an humbler christening. Juan Pardo--John Gray--was the sponsor, and the witnesses were "Baltazar Vazquez, the sacristan, and I who baptized him and signed with my name," says Mr. Bachelor Serrano, who never dreamed he was stumbling into fame when he touched that pink face with the holy water and called the child Miguel. It is my profound conviction that Juan Pardo brought the baby himself to the church and took it home again, screaming wrathfully; Neighbor' Pardo feeling a little sheepish and mentally resolving never to do another good-natured action as long as he lived.

As for the neophyte, he could not be blamed for screaming and kicking against the new existence he was entering, if the instinct of genius gave him any hint of it. Between the font of St. Mary's and the bier at St. Ildefonso's there was scarcely an hour of joy waiting him in his long life, except that which comes from n.o.ble and earnest work.

His youth was pa.s.sed in the shabby privation of a poor gentleman's house; his early talents attracted the attention of my Lord Aquaviva, the papal legate, who took him back to Rome in his service; but the high-spirited youth soon left the inglorious ease of the cardinal's house to enlist as a private soldier in the sea-war against the Turk. He fought bravely at Lepanto, where he was three times wounded and his left hand crippled. Going home for promotion, loaded with praise and kind letters from the generous b.a.s.t.a.r.d, Don Juan of Austria, the true son of the Emperor Charles and pretty Barbara Blumberg, he was captured with his brother by the Moors, and pa.s.sed five miserable years in slavery, never for one instant submitting to his lot, but wearying his hostile fate with constant struggles. He headed a dozen attempts at flight or insurrection, and yet his thrifty owners would not kill him. They thought a man who bore letters from a prince, and who continued c.o.c.k of his walk through years of servitude, would one day bring a round ransom.

At last the tardy day of his redemption came, but not from the cold-hearted tyrant he had so n.o.bly served. The matter was presented to him by Cervantes's comrades, but he would do nothing. So that Don Roderick sold his estate and his sisters sacrificed their dowry to buy the freedom of the captive brothers.

They came back to Spain still young enough to be fond of glory, and simple-hearted enough to believe in the justice of the great. They immediately joined the army and served in the war with Portugal. The elder brother made his way and got some little promotion, but Miguel got married and discharged, and wrote verses and plays, and took a small office in Seville, and moved with the Court to Valladolid; and kept his accounts badly, and was too honest to steal, and so got into jail, and grew every year poorer and wittier and better; he was a public amanuensis, a business agent, a sub-tax-gatherer,--anything to keep his lean larder garnished with scant ammunition against the wolf hunger. In these few lines you have the pitiful story of the life of the greatest of Spaniards, up to his return to Madrid in 1606, when he was nearly sixty years old.

From this point his history becomes clearer and more connected up to the time of his death. He lived in the new-built suburb, erected on the site of the gardens of the Duke of Lerma, first minister and favorite of Philip III. It was a quarter much affected by artists and men of letters, and equally so by ecclesiastics. The names of the streets indicate the traditions of piety and art that still hallow the neighborhood. Jesus Street leads you into the street of Lope de Vega.

Quevedo and Saint Augustine run side by side. In the same neighborhood are the streets called Cervantes, Saint Mary, and Saint Joseph, and just round the corner are the Magdalen and the Love-of-G.o.d. The actors and artists of that day were pious and devout madcaps. They did not abound in morality, but they had of religion enough and to spare. Many of them were members of religious orders, and it is this fact which has procured us such accurate records of their history. All the events in the daily life of the religious establishments were carefully recorded, and the ma.n.u.script archives of the convents and brotherhoods of that period are rich in materials for the biographer.

There was a special reason for the sudden rise of religious brotherhoods among the laity. The great schism of England had been fully completed under Elizabeth. The devout heart of Spain was bursting under this wrong, and they could think of no way to avenge it. They would fain have roasted the whole heretical island, but the memory of the Armada was fresh in men's minds, and the great Philip was dead. There were not enough heretics in Spain to make it worth while to waste time in hunting them. Philip could say as Narvaez, on his death-bed, said to his confessor who urged him to forgive his enemies, "Bless your heart, I have none. I have killed them all." To ease their pious hearts, they formed confraternities all over Spain, for the worship of the Host. They called themselves "Unworthy Slaves of the Most Holy Sacrament." These grew at once very popular in all cla.s.ses. Artisans rushed in, and wasted half their working days in processions and meetings. The severe Suarez de Figueroa speaks savagely of the crowd of Narcissuses and pet.i.ts maitres (a word which is delicious in its Spanish dress of petimetres) who entered the congregations simply to flutter about the processions in brave raiment, to be admired of the mult.i.tude. But there were other more serious members,--the politicians who joined to stand well with the bigot court, and the devout believers who found comfort and edification in worship. Of this latter cla.s.s was Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, who joined the brotherhood in the street of the Olivar in 1609. He was now sixty-two years old, and somewhat infirm,--a time, as he said, when a man's salvation is no joke. From this period to the day of his death he seemed to be laboring, after the fashion of the age, to fortify his standing in the other world. He adopted the habit of the Franciscans in Alcala in 1613, and formally professed in the Third Order in 1616, three weeks before his death.

There are those who find the mirth and fun of his later works so inconsistent with these ascetic professions, that they have been led to believe Cervantes a bit of a hypocrite. But we cannot agree with such.

Literature was at that time a diversion of the great, and the chief aim of the writer was to amuse. The best opinion of scholars now is that Rabelais, whose genius ill.u.s.trated the preceding century, was a man of serious and severe life, whose gaulish crudeness of style and brilliant wit have been the cause of all the fables that distort his personal history.

No one can read attentively even the Quixote without seeing how powerful an influence was exerted by his religion even upon the n.o.ble and kindly soul of Cervantes. He was a blind bigot and a devoted royalist, like all the rest. The mean neglect of the Court never caused his stanch loyalty to swerve. The expulsion of the Moors, the crowning crime and madness of the reign of Philip III., found in him a hearty advocate and defender.

_Non facit monachum cucullus,--_it was not his hood and girdle that made him a monk; he was thoroughly saturated with their spirit before he put them on. But he was the n.o.blest courtier and the kindliest bigot that ever flattered or persecuted.

In 1610, the Count of Lemos, who had in his grand and distant way patronized the poet, was appointed Viceroy of Naples, and took with him to his kingdom a brilliant following of Spanish wits and scholars. He refused the pet.i.tion of the greatest of them all, however, and to soften the blow gave him a small pension, which he continued during the rest of Cervantes's life. It was a mere pittance, a bone thrown to an old hound, but he took it and gnawed it with a grat.i.tude more generous than the gift. From this time forth all his works were dedicated to the Lord of Lemos, and they form a garland more brilliant and enduring than the crown of the Spains. Only kind words to disguised fairies have ever been so munificently repaid, as this young n.o.ble's pension to the old genius.

It certainly eased somewhat his declining years. Relieving him from the necessity of earning his daily crust, it gave him leisure to complete and bring out in rapid succession the works which have made him immortal. He had published the first part of Don Quixote in the midst of his hungry poverty at Valladolid in 1605. He was then fifty-eight, and all his works that survive are posterior to that date. He built his monument from the ground up, in his old age. The Persiles and Sigis-munda, the Exemplary Novels, and that most masterly and perfect work, the Second Part of Quixote, were written by the flickering glimmer of a life burnt out.

It would be incorrect to infer that the scanty dole of his patron sustained him in comfort. Nothing more clearly proves his straitened circ.u.mstances than his frequent change of lodgings. Old men do not move for the love of variety. We have traced him through six streets in the last four years of his life. But a touching fact is that they are all in the same quarter. It is understood that his natural daughter and only child, Isabel de Saavedra, entered the Convent of the Trinitarian nuns in the street of Cantarranas--Singing Frogs--at some date unknown. All the shifting and changing which Cervantes made in these embarra.s.sed years are within a small half-circle, whose centre is his grave and the cell of his child. He fluttered about that little convent like a gaunt old eagle about the cage that guards his callow young.

Like Albert Duerer, like Raphael and Van Dyck, he painted his own portrait at this time with a force and vigor of touch which leaves little to the imagination. As few people ever read the Exemplary Novels,--more is the pity,--I will translate this pa.s.sage from the Prologue:--

"He whom you see there with the aquiline face, chestnut hair, a smooth and open brow, merry eyes, a nose curved but well proportioned, a beard of silver which twenty years ago was of gold, long mustaches, a small mouth, not too full of teeth, seeing he has but six, and these in bad condition, a form of middle height, a lively color, rather fair than brown, somewhat round-shouldered and not too light on his feet; this is the face of the author of Galatea and of Don Quixote de la Mancha, of him who made the Voyage to Parna.s.sus, and other works which are straying about without the name of the owner: he is commonly called Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra."

There were, after all, compensations in this evening of life. As long as his dropsy would let him, he climbed the hilly street of the Olivar to say his prayers in the little oratory. He pa.s.sed many a cheerful hour of gossip with Mother Francisca Romero, the independent superior of the Trinitarian Convent, until the time when the Supreme Council, jealous of the freedom of the good lady's life, walled up the door which led from her house to her convent and cut her off from her nuns. He sometimes dropped into the studios of Carducho and Caxes, and one of them made a sketch of him one fortunate day. He was friends with many of the easy-going Bohemians who swarmed in the quarter,--Cristobal de Mesa, Quevedo, and Mendoza, whose writings, Don Miguel says, are distinguished by the absence of all that would bring a "blush to the cheek of a young person,"--

"Por graves, puros, castos y excelentes."