THE LIFE OF CERVANTES.* A norrez at the corner of
the Calle de Leon and the Calle de Cervantes at Madrid, on the ground-floor of which coal and groceries are now sold, bears the inscription : "Here lived and died Miguel de Cervantes, whose genius the whole world admires." A stone's-theow away is the yellow and grey con- vent of the Trinitarians where Cervantes was buried. No fact or memory that concerns him can be insignificant for us. He is one of the few writers about whom every detail is precious. We wish to know all the facts without embellish. ment. Yet were we to discover him in a mean or dishonest transaction we should feel, as it were, a personal lose, since through all his writings it is the man himself who charms us by his humour, courage, and essential nobility. Professor Fitzmauriee-Kelly has sifted the facts with the keenness of a detective, a keenness which confers interest and importance on apparently trivial occurrences—the bequest, for instance, by Cervantes's wife to her brother of fifty reales yearly to buy himself books, or the wish of Cerrantes's daughter Isabel to pees for younger than she was—and he has written a memoir of Cervantes based at all points on the evidence of documents. Additions may become necessary as research unearths new documents, but it is scarcely probable that any of the statements so precisely authenticated in this volume will be challenged; and all future biographers of Cervantes will necessarily make Professor Fitzmaurice-Kelly's work their starting-point :—
" My aim," be says in his preface, "has been to give every known fact about Cervantes, suppressing nothing, extenuating nothing, unswayed as far as possible by the natural bias which we all have in favour of a groat creative genius whose subtle charm has fascinated successive generations for three centuries. Against this inevitable prepossession I have been constantly on guard. As it happens, Cervantes needs no apologist: he is one of those rare men who can afford to have the whole truth told about them."
We infer from the evidence here presented that in money matters and in the affairs of his family Cervantes displayed
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considerable carelessness, but we cannot well infer anything worse. His carelessness led him into many troubles—law. suits, writs, and imprisonment—which might have embittered a naturs, of less breadth and generosity. The whole of the second half of his life, from the date of his release in 1580 from his five years' captivity in Africa, seems, in fact, to have been a aeries of such troubles; and foreign inquirers concern• ing him in 1615, a year before his death, learnt that he was "old, a soldier, a gentleman, and poor." His fame already extended far beyond the frontier of Spain, but, although be was in his sixty-eighth year, he was obliged to write for a bare subsistence. Yet he was not discouraged; he was "full of projects," and death found him engaged upon five works, only one of which, Persiles y Sigismunda (1617), ever saw the light. Thus for all the sadness of his home life, his poverty and disappointments, his spirit was as unbroken as when he fruitlessly planned escape after escape for himself and other captives in Algiers.
It is curious to realize that during the first year of his captivity the greatest lyric poet of the century, a spirit not less resolute than Cervantes's, Fray Luis de LeOn, was also in prison. But whereas Cervantes was the prisoner of the enemies of the faith and his release was hastened by the efforts of the Trinitarian monks, Luis de Leon was confined in the Valladolid dungeon of the Inquisition. During his imprisonment of nearly five years Luis de LeOn was upheld by his literary work ; and Cervantes no doubt found in the creations of his mind welcome distraction from the apparent pettiness of his life at Valladolid and Madrid- But he kept his sense of reality, and the strong charm of his character (" en estremo tiene especial gracia en todo," said one who knew him) must, moreover, have won him many friends. The pathetic words written on April 19th, 1616, four days before his death, in which he bids these friends good-bye (" Adios gracias, adios donaires, adios regocijados amigos"), would prove, were not the fact sufficiently established by the appearance of the second half of Don Quixote but a few months earlier, that through the misfortunes of his career as a soldier and through his needy old age as a writer, he bad preserved his zest in life unblunted.
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