Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/367

Rh CERVANTES 355 of which had been freely announced to his friends for some time previously, Cervantes was destined to encounter per haps the strangest of the many crosses with which his pitiless evil star teased him to the end of his troubled and painful life. He had seen, while in the flush of manhood, his dream of soldiership dispelled by a cruel captivity. He had experienced the overthrow of all his hopes of civil preferment. He had been subject to every kind of mor tification in his literary ambition. He had been jostled out of the arena by his rivals in poetry and in the drama. When old, infirm, and destitute, his genius had at last found in Don Quixote its proper field of employment and something like a fitting recognition. But even here he was not to be left undisturbed. The ill-fortune which never ceased to inako him its mark was able to send a shaft through this his strongest side, which poisoned all his hardly-earned triumph and vexed him to the grave. The The false story of the false second part of Don Quixote, published Quixote. under the name of Avellaneda, is one of the strangest in literary history, the mystery of which, though it has occupied many volumes, is not yet wholly unravelled. It is sufficient here to say that after it was well known that Cervantes was employed upon and had nearly completed his second part of Don Quixote, there appeared at Tarragona in 1614 a book pretending to be a continuation of the knight s adventures, by Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda, a native of Tordesillas. The manifest object of this impudent fabri cation was to malign the character of Cervantes, to destroy the credit of his book, and to deprive him of the fame and profit which he expected to derive from its completion. In a preface, full of a curious malignity, evidently arising from soute cause deeper than literary envy, Cervantes was reproached in the grossest terms with his infirmities and misfortunes, even with his wounds, sneered at as one &quot; with more tongue than hands,&quot; reviled as old, poor, and without friends, branded as envious and discontented, a calumniator of great men, and an evil-speaker even of the Church and the Holy Office. In the body of the book, under pretence of carrying on the story, every opportunity is taken to spoil it, by degrading the characters and giving a coarse turn to the incidents. Don Quixote is debased into a wild lunatic, who ends his days in a mad-house ; Sancho is turned into a dull buffoon and his humour into brutal gluttony. In place of the witty and beautiful Doro thea we have the gross wench Barbara ; and the graceful episodes of the original are represented by a string of dreary and vulgar adventures, without life, colour, or probability. Apart from the spirit of malice, the book, in the words of Ticknor, is &quot; so completely without dignity or consistency that it is clear the writer did not possess the power of comprehending the genius he at once basely libelled and meanly attempted to supplant.&quot; Xothieg in viler taste has ever disfigured the literature of any nation, and it is greatly to the scandal of Cervantes s countrymen, not the least of the injuries they have done him, alive and dead, that they have suffered such a book to be reprinted and to retain a place in their national collections. The false Don Quixote, in which Le Sage, and even some later critics, both French and Spanish, have pretended to see merits equal if not superior to those of the true, is now remembered only by Cervantes s perhaps too frequent refer ences to it in the later chapters of his own book, and has little interest except in connection with the mystery of his life. The identity of Avellaneda is a problem which has greatly exercised the Spanish critics. The weight of opinion is in favour of its being the disguise of the notorious Fray Luis de Aliaga, the low-born confessor and minion of the Duke de Lerma, who was high in power during the reign of Philip III. Of all whose names have been suggested as the probable author of the spurious Quixote Aliaga is the only one who fulfils the required conditions. He was a Dominican, a preacher, and an Aragonese. He was an intimate friend of Lope de Vega, whose cause he openly espoused. He was in the confidence of the Holy Office, and may be suspected of not being well-disposed to Cer- vautes s patron the archbishop of Toledo, whom he suc ceeded as Inquisitor-General. He was known to be of a rancorous and envious spirit, who had written more than one pseudonymous libel, and was himself the mark of frequent caricatures and lampoons. Lastly, it has been proved that, before the appearance of Don Quixote, Aliaga s well-known nickname was Sancho. There was much in the book of Cervantes to give such a man offence, even whether such offence was intended or not, in his person, his character, his office, and his religion. That as Avellaueda he found assistance among some of the writers of the period, rivals of Cervantes and jealous of his fame, is very probable ; and there is only too much reason for suspecting that the great Lope de Vega himself was one of Aliaga s allies. Although Spanish writers are slow to admit that the rela tions between the two illustrious contemporaries were other wise than friendly, and although on the side of Cervantes there never was any other than the spirit of perfect cour tesy, loyalty, and magnanimity which became his own nobh nature, recent researches have proved that by Lope de Vega these feelings were not honestly reciprocated. He who was called by his own familiar friend Alarcon &quot; the universal envier of other men s meeds &quot; is known to have regarded with jealous eyes the sudden popularity achieved by his despised competitor in Don Quixote. In addition to other proofs of an indirect kind tending to show that about the time of the appearance of Don Quixote Lope de Vega was ill-disposed towards his once intimate friend, we have the direct evidence of the letter discovered by Schack among the manuscripts of Count Altamira, dated August 4, 1604, wherein occurs this passage: &quot;Of poets I speak not ; many are budding for the year to come ; but none is so bad as Cervantes, or so stupid as to praise Don Quixote.&quot; With Don Quixote it could scarcely be expected that Lope would be pleased ; and there was much in the book, especially in the Canon s strictures on the popular drama, to give him offence. If he stooped so low for his revenge as to inspire or to aid his friend Aliaga to write the false Don Quixote, his triumph was but brief. At the close of 1615 Cervantes published his own second part, and from that moment the other was for ever blotted from the world s memory. This second part, though bearing marks of haste in the concluding chapters, belies, according to the judgment of the best critics, the opinion of the author himself as expressed through tlie mouth of the Priest, that second parts are never good. Although written in old age it contains at least as much of the glow and warmth of imagination as the first, while it is even superior in invention. There is more harmony in the construction, more correctness if not more vigour in the style, with fewer distractions and digressions. The author has more confidence in himself and more love of his work. His hero is more consistent in his mad ness, Sancho more pleasant in his sanity. Both master and man, especially the latter, while still true to their character, have developed into an ampler and richer nature. They have evidently advanced in their creator s favour, and have more pains taken with their behaviour. The knight is more lovable, the squire more humorous ; and the whole treatment of the story, with its vivacity and variety, its easy flow of narrative, and its masterly and pathetic close, is worthy of the happy genius of which it is the crown and full development. By this time the fame of Cervantes had spread through many lands. Numerous editions of his Don Quixote had