Four generations had laughed over “Don Quixote”
before it occurred to anyone to ask, who and what
manner of man was this Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
whose name is on the title-page; and it was too late
for a satisfactory answer to the question when it
was proposed to add a life of the author to the London
edition published at Lord Carteret’s instance
in 1738. All traces of the personality of Cervantes
had by that time disappeared. Any floating traditions
that may once have existed, transmitted from men who
had known him, had long since died out, and of other
record there was none; for the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries were incurious as to “the men of the
time,” a reproach against which the nineteenth
has, at any rate, secured itself, if it has produced
no Shakespeare or Cervantes. All that Mayans
y Siscar, to whom the task was entrusted, or any of
those who followed him, Rios, Pellicer, or Navarrete,
could do was to eke out the few allusions Cervantes
makes to himself in his various prefaces with such
pieces of documentary evidence bearing upon his life
as they could find.
This, however, has been done by the last-named biographer
to such good purpose that he has superseded all predecessors.
Thoroughness is the chief characteristic of Navarrete’s
work. Besides sifting, testing, and methodising
with rare patience and judgment what had been previously
brought to light, he left, as the saying is, no stone
unturned under which anything to illustrate his subject
might possibly be found. Navarrete has done all
that industry and acumen could do, and it is no fault
of his if he has not given us what we want. What
Hallam says of Shakespeare may be applied to the almost
parallel case of Cervantes: “It is not
the register of his baptism, or the draft of his will,
or the orthography of his name that we seek; no letter
of his writing, no record of his conversation, no
character of him drawn ... by a contemporary has been
produced.”
It is only natural, therefore, that the biographers
of Cervantes, forced to make brick without straw,
should have recourse largely to conjecture, and that
conjecture should in some instances come by degrees
to take the place of established fact. All that
I propose to do here is to separate what is matter
of fact from what is matter of conjecture, and leave
it to the reader’s judgment to decide whether
the data justify the inference or not.
The men whose names by common consent stand in the
front rank of Spanish literature, Cervantes, Lope
de Vega, Quevedo, Calderon, Garcilaso de la Vega,
the Mendozas, Gongora, were all men of ancient families,
and, curiously, all, except the last, of families
that traced their origin to the same mountain district
in the North of Spain. The family of Cervantes
is commonly said to have been of Galician origin, and
unquestionably it was in possession of lands in Galicia
