Albert Frederick Calvert

“ If Cervantes had not written Don Quixote, his literary worth would never have been recognised; but his name would yet have been preserved to us as “the man of Lepanto” and the captive of Algiers. That he survived his wounds and captivity, his poverty and persecution, to publish in his fifty-ninth year a work which Dr. Johnson esteemed the greatest book in the world after the Iliad, is not less remarkable than the fact that his whole career, with all his varied and unrelieved vicissitudes, was necessary for its composition. ”

“ PREFACE. THREE hundred years ago this month the First Part of El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha was published in Madrid, and the world was made the richer by a book which will last until “the silver chord be loosed or the golden bowl be broken”; until the earth relapses into its original silence and language is no more spoken or read. It is somewhat late to weave new laurels for the brow of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra—the last word on Don Quixote has been spoken. ”

“ In the university city of Alcala, “in that fruitful harvest-time of Spanish literature,” he cultivated the muses; in Italy—which, at that period, was dominated by Spain—surrounded, as he was, on all sides by the indomitable Spanish infantry, who “made the earth tremble with their firelocks,” the spirit of Cervantes was fired with military ardour. Christendom, too, was at perpetual war with the Turks, and to a youth of Cervantes’ chivalrous temperament the prospects offered by a career which united the services of both Church and King would prove irresistible. ”

“ If my wounds do not shine in the eyes of him who looks on them, they are at least honoured in the estimation of those who know where they were acquired; for the soldier looks better dead in battle than alive in flight. And so much I am of this opinion that if now I could devise and bring about the impossible, I would rather be present again in that wonderful action than now be whole of my wounds, without having taken part therein.”
With this manly and characteristic protest we may, I think, close the volume of this scandal, and press forward to the near close of Cervantes’ career. ”

“ But Cervantes, undashed by ingratitude and undaunted by hardship, retained his loyalty, and relinquished not a tittle of his chivalrous conceptions and aspirations. He was still desperately sincere in the convictions, which never left him, that “there is nothing in the world more commendable than to serve God in the first place, and the King in the next, especially in the profession of arms, which, if it does not procure a man so much riches as learning, may at least entitle him to more honour.” ”

“ Humour it has, the ripest and rarest that has ever been translated into our language, and pathos that touches the depths of the human emotion. Sir Walter Scott speaks of Cervantes’ humour as “the very poetry of the comic, founded on a tender sympathy with all forms of existence, though displaying itself in sportive reflection, and issuing, not in superficial laughter, but in still smiles, the source of which lies far deeper” ”

“ Cervantes himself has declared, through the mouth of the scholar, Samson Carrasco, that second parts are never good, but this rule found a striking exception in the case of his own work. With increasing years the author betrayed no sign of flagging vivacity; experience had lent him a surer hand in the development of character; and while the Knight of La Mancha’s adventures take on a less fantastic guise, and his reflections increase in wisdom, the wit of Sancho Panza broadens and ripens, and the humanity of the immortal comrades acquires a deeper note. ”

“ They were writing innumerable verses at the same period; but while Lope de Vega, following the custom of the day, lampooned his colleagues, and levelled foul and venemous sonnets at his contemporaries, Cervantes steadily set his face against the practice. He had laid down a rule for his own guidance, from which he never diverged. He can jest a brother poet and banter the foibles of the writers of his day with gentle irony and good humour, but he reserves his censure and his sarcasm for the castigation of evil, vice and folly. ”

“ The great contemporary of Shakespeare has long since come into his own among the world’s heroes; no country has forborne to do him honour; no literature is complete that does not contain a translation of his book.
But while the career of Cervantes forms as eventful and varied a history as that of the Knight-errant of La Mancha himself—Don Quixote might even be read as the sequel of its author’s life—the number of biographies of the Spanish writer in the English tongue is curiously limited. ”

“ In England and France and Germany it is still regarded as a romance, unapproachable in its genre; a work of true genius, supreme, imperishable. But in Spain it has passed from romance, in the national mind, into the realms of reality. In La Mancha the people point to the windmills as proof of the Don’s existence; in Argamasilla they show you the house in which the Knight lived, and draw attention to the ruins of a large, round window, out of which the curate and the barber consigned Don Quixote’s library to the flames. ”

“ While we must deplore the wounds which Cervantes received in the wars, and sorrow over the duress he suffered in Algiers, it must be always remembered with pride that it was to his personal valour, and nobility in adversity, that we owe the full and particular account that we have of these years of his career. ”

“ Between 1571 and 1575 Cervantes lived the strenuous life of a private soldier, taking part in two campaigns, fighting with enthusiasm, enduring wounds and hardships with stoical fortitude, and acquiring that knowledge of men and things which he was afterwards to employ to such good purpose. ”

“ It was inevitable that a man of the disposition of Vega, whom his friend, Alarcon, has described as “the universal envier of the applause given to others,” should have envied the fame and genius of Cervantes, who, as Mr. Watts has written, was “of a temper the sweetest among men of genius, who had come through the fiery ordeal of a life of hardship with a heart unsoured as with honour unblemished.” As poet and novelist, Cervantes outdistanced the younger writer in public estimation, and as the author of Don Quixote, he soared to a height which has been unattained by any other Spanish novelist ”

“ If Cervantes, in writing Don Quixote, was laughing away Spain’s chivalry, as Lord Byron erroneously declared, then he was the target of his own destructive cynicism, for the story of his career is that of a man who practised a chivalry which was already extinct in Spain, and maintained unswervingly a code of honour which had fallen into desuetude. ”

“ In a letter to his “very illustrious lord,” the Archbishop of Toledo, dated 26th March, 1616, Cervantes wrote: “If for the malady which affects me there could be any relief, the repeated marks of favour and protection which your illustrious person bestows on me would be sufficient to relieve me: but, indeed, it increases so greatly that I think it will make an end of me, although not of my gratitude.” In his valedictory dedication to the Conde de Lemos he speaks of himself as “with one foot in the stirrup, waiting the call of death.” ”

“ MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA.
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the unanimity with which all the witnesses—including the captives of the highest rank and character in Algiers—give their testimony in favour of their beloved comrade, are quite remarkable, and without precedent. They speak of him in terms such as no knight of romance ever deserved; of his courage in danger; his resolution under suffering; his patience in trouble; his daring and fertility of resource in action. He seems to have won the hearts of all the captives, both laymen and clerics, by his good humour, unselfish devotion, and kindliness of heart. ”

“ He had, properly speaking, exhausted his originality in the first part, together with his store of situations, his brilliancy of wit, his freshness of imagery, his peculiar power of delineating singular characters, and placing them in singular circumstances. There is wit in the second part, but it is pale; comedy, but it is forced; vivacity, but it is artificial. You discover nearly everywhere comparative poverty of invention, but a perpetual tendency to imitate himself.”
What shall be said of Don Quixote that has not been said already? ”

“ Now for a man to attain to an eminent degree of learning costs him time, watching, hunger, nakedness, dizziness in the head, weakness in the stomach, and other inconveniences, which are the consequence of those, of which I have already in part made mention. But the rising gradually to be a good soldier is purchased at the whole expense of all that is required for learning, and that in so surpassing a degree that there is no comparison betwixt them, because he is every moment in danger of his life. ”

“ We all have something of Don Quixote about us; we all take windmills for giants; all are spurred upward from time to time by an impulse of enthusiasm, and driven back by a laugh of disdain; are all a mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous, and feel, with profound bitterness, the{62} perpetual contrast between the greatness of our aspirations and the weakness of our powers. ”

“ He must have been re-living the emotions he experienced on his return to his native land, when he made Don Quixote declare to his faithful squire: “Liberty ... is one of the most valuable blessings that heaven has bestowed upon mankind. Not all the treasures concealed in the bowels of the earth, nor those in the bosom of the sea can be compared with it. ”

“ On this point, as on most details affecting Cervantes, Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly is emphatic in his conclusion, and he accepts the decision by Máinez, that if the hand is the hand of Avellaneda, the voice is the voice of Lope de Vega. He finds in the character of the celebrated dramatist the temperamental fitness for such a task, and he locates the incentive in his unsupportable jealousy. “Till Don Quixote appeared no rival had ever dared to come within the shadow of his throne, and its lasting success was torment to his soul. ”

“ For liberty a man may—nay, ought—to hazard even his life, as well as for honour, accounting captivity the greatest misery he can endure.”
History tells us that even in the comparatively brief period of Cervantes’ captivity the decline of the mighty Empire of Spain had commenced. The inherent meanness of Philip’s spirit, his religious intolerance, his incompetence as both statesman and soldier, and the dominant power of the priests, had sapped the nation’s energy, and crushed national ambition. The character of the king set the seal on the country’s destiny. ”

“ But what is most to be admired is, that no sooner one falls, where he shall never rise till the end of the world, than another steps into the same place; and if he also drops into the sea, which lies in wait for him like an enemy, another, and after him another, stills fills up the place, without suffering any interval of time to separate their deaths, a resolution and boldness scarce to be paralleled in any other trials of war. ”

“ If Montesquieu’s similarly extravagant comment that “the Spaniards have but one book—that which has made all the others ridiculous” comes nearer to the truth, it must be conceded that the romances which Cervantes exterminated were scarcely worth preserving. But the book affords also another proof that truth surpasses fiction in strangeness, since the popularity of Don Quixote, its effect, and its immortality surprised no one so much as its author. ”

“ It is the second-rate writers who undertake seriously the task which the master attempts, with his tongue in his cheek and contempt for his output in his heart, who achieve their object. So Cervantes failed again as a playwright, and he failed so conspicuously that Blas de Nasarre, who republished these poor farces and more inferior comedies in 1749, claimed that the author had written them in ridicule of Lope de Vega, just as he had written Don Quixote in ridicule of the books of chivalry ”

“ Kelly’s conclusion that Cervantes was immensely proud of his dramatic work. “No man,” says this writer, “was more sublimely confident of the sincerity of his own mission; no man more certain that he deserved success. Years afterwards, when he had found his true way, when the fame of the author of Don Quixote was gone abroad in every land, he still turned his wistful eyes to the memory of the days when he had hoped to win immortality upon the stage. ”

“ If one lays it down, another takes it up; while one is asking for it, another one snatches it; in short, this history affords the most pleasing and least prejudicial entertainment that ever was published, for there is not so much as the appearance of an immodest word in it, nor a thought that is not entirely catholic.”
Concerning the publication and popularity of Don Quixote, many stories of varying degrees of improbability have sprung up, and are common to most of the biographies of Cervantes. ”

“ Miguel de Cervantes came of a good, if not noble family, which traced its origin back to the tenth century. Poverty, as he himself has said, may cloud, but cannot wholly obscure nobility; and although his parents appear to have possessed an indifferent share of this world’s goods, they ranked among the hidalgos of Alcala de Henares, in New Castile, where Miguel was born, in 1547. To-day Alcala is a dull, featureless little town, decaying by the sleepy waters{4} of the Henares, memorable only by reason of the mighty names which are associated with its history. ”