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Volume[ About Don Quixote

CHAPTER[ Translators Preface

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

I: ABOUT THIS TRANSLATION

It was with considerable reluctance that I abandoned in favour of the

present undertaking what had long been a favourite project: that of a new

edition of Shelton's "Don Quixote," which has now become a somewhat

scarce book. There are some--and I confess myself to be one--for whom

Shelton's racy old version, with all its defects, has a charm that no

modern translation, however skilful or correct, could possess. Shelton

had the inestimable advantage of belonging to the same generation as

Cervantes; "Don Quixote" had to him a vitality that only a contemporary

could feel; it cost him no dramatic effort to see things as Cervantes saw

them; there is no anachronism in his language; he put the Spanish of

Cervantes into the English of Shakespeare. Shakespeare himself most

likely knew the book; he may have carried it home with him in his

saddle-bags to Stratford on one of his last journeys, and under the

mulberry tree at New Place joined hands with a kindred genius in its

pages.

But it was soon made plain to me that to hope for even a moderate

popularity for Shelton was vain. His fine old crusted English would, no

doubt, be relished by a minority, but it would be only by a minority. His

warmest admirers must admit that he is not a satisfactory representative

of Cervantes. His translation of the First Part was very hastily made and

was never revised by him. It has all the freshness and vigour, but also a

full measure of the faults, of a hasty production. It is often very

literal--barbarously literal frequently--but just as often very loose. He

had evidently a good colloquial knowledge of Spanish, but apparently not

much more. It never seems to occur to him that the same translation of a

word will not suit in every case.

It is often said that we have no satisfactory translation of "Don

Quixote." To those who are familiar with the original, it savours of

truism or platitude to say so, for in truth there can be no thoroughly

satisfactory translation of "Don Quixote" into English or any other

language. It is not that the Spanish idioms are so utterly unmanageable,

or that the untranslatable words, numerous enough no doubt, are so

superabundant, but rather that the sententious terseness to which the

humour of the book owes its flavour is peculiar to Spanish, and can at

best be only distantly imitated in any other tongue.

The history of our English translations of "Don Quixote" is instructive.

Shelton's, the first in any language, was made, apparently, about 1608,

but not published till 1612. This of course was only the First Part. It

has been asserted that the Second, published in 1620, is not the work of

Shelton, but there is nothing to support the assertion save the fact that

it has less spirit, less of what we generally understand by "go," about

it than the first, which would be only natural if the first were the work

of a young man writing currente calamo, and the second that of a

middle-aged man writing for a bookseller. On the other hand, it is closer

and more literal, the style is the same, the very same translations, or

mistranslations, occur in it, and it is extremely unlikely that a new

translator would, by suppressing his name, have allowed Shelton to carry

off the credit.

In 1687 John Phillips, Milton's nephew, produced a "Don Quixote" "made

English," he says, "according to the humour of our modern language." His

"Quixote" is not so much a translation as a travesty, and a travesty that

for coarseness, vulgarity, and buffoonery is almost unexampled even in

the literature of that day.

Ned Ward's "Life and Notable Adventures of Don Quixote, merrily

translated into Hudibrastic Verse" (1700), can scarcely be reckoned a

translation, but it serves to show the light in which "Don Quixote" was

regarded at the time.

A further illustration may be found in the version published in 1712 by

Peter Motteux, who had then recently combined tea-dealing with

literature. It is described as "translated from the original by several

hands," but if so all Spanish flavour has entirely evaporated under the

manipulation of the several hands. The flavour that it has, on the other

hand, is distinctly Franco-cockney. Anyone who compares it carefully with

the original will have little doubt that it is a concoction from Shelton

and the French of Filleau de Saint Martin, eked out by borrowings from

Phillips, whose mode of treatment it adopts. It is, to be sure, more

decent and decorous, but it treats "Don Quixote" in the same fashion as a

comic book that cannot be made too comic.

To attempt to improve the humour of "Don Quixote" by an infusion of

cockney flippancy and facetiousness, as Motteux's operators did, is not

merely an impertinence like larding a sirloin of prize beef, but an

absolute falsification of the spirit of the book, and it is a proof of

the uncritical way in which "Don Quixote" is generally read that this

worse than worthless translation--worthless as failing to represent,

worse than worthless as misrepresenting--should have been favoured as it

has been.

It had the effect, however, of bringing out a translation undertaken and

executed in a very different spirit, that of Charles Jervas, the portrait

painter, and friend of Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, and Gay. Jervas has been

allowed little credit for his work, indeed it may be said none, for it is

known to the world in general as Jarvis's. It was not published until

after his death, and the printers gave the name according to the current

pronunciation of the day. It has been the most freely used and the most

freely abused of all the translations. It has seen far more editions than

any other, it is admitted on all hands to be by far the most faithful,

and yet nobody seems to have a good word to say for it or for its author.

Jervas no doubt prejudiced readers against himself in his preface, where

among many true words about Shelton, Stevens, and Motteux, he rashly and

unjustly charges Shelton with having translated not from the Spanish, but

from the Italian version of Franciosini, which did not appear until ten

years after Shelton's first volume. A suspicion of incompetence, too,

seems to have attached to him because he was by profession a painter and

a mediocre one (though he has given us the best portrait we have of

Swift), and this may have been strengthened by Pope's remark that he

"translated 'Don Quixote' without understanding Spanish." He has been

also charged with borrowing from Shelton, whom he disparaged. It is true

that in a few difficult or obscure passages he has followed Shelton, and

gone astray with him; but for one case of this sort, there are fifty

where he is right and Shelton wrong. As for Pope's dictum, anyone who

examines Jervas's version carefully, side by side with the original, will

see that he was a sound Spanish scholar, incomparably a better one than

Shelton, except perhaps in mere colloquial Spanish. He was, in fact, an

honest, faithful, and painstaking translator, and he has left a version

which, whatever its shortcomings may be, is singularly free from errors

and mistranslations.

The charge against it is that it is stiff, dry--"wooden" in a word,-and

no one can deny that there is a foundation for it. But it may be pleaded

for Jervas that a good deal of this rigidity is due to his abhorrence of

the light, flippant, jocose style of his predecessors. He was one of the

few, very few, translators that have shown any apprehension of the

unsmiling gravity which is the essence of Quixotic humour; it seemed to

him a crime to bring Cervantes forward smirking and grinning at his own

good things, and to this may be attributed in a great measure the ascetic

abstinence from everything savouring of liveliness which is the

characteristic of his translation. In most modern editions, it should be

observed, his style has been smoothed and smartened, but without any

reference to the original Spanish, so that if he has been made to read

more agreeably he has also been robbed of his chief merit of fidelity.

Smollett's version, published in 1755, may be almost counted as one of

these. At any rate it is plain that in its construction Jervas's

translation was very freely drawn upon, and very little or probably no

heed given to the original Spanish.

The later translations may be dismissed in a few words. George Kelly's,

which appeared in 1769, "printed for the Translator," was an impudent

imposture, being nothing more than Motteux's version with a few of the

words, here and there, artfully transposed; Charles Wilmot's (1774) was

only an abridgment like Florian's, but not so skilfully executed; and the

version published by Miss Smirke in 1818, to accompany her brother's

plates, was merely a patchwork production made out of former

translations. On the latest, Mr. A. J. Duffield's, it would be in every

sense of the word impertinent in me to offer an opinion here. I had not

even seen it when the present undertaking was proposed to me, and since

then I may say vidi tantum, having for obvious reasons resisted the

temptation which Mr. Duffield's reputation and comely volumes hold out to

every lover of Cervantes.

From the foregoing history of our translations of "Don Quixote," it will

be seen that there are a good many people who, provided they get the mere

narrative with its full complement of facts, incidents, and adventures

served up to them in a form that amuses them, care very little whether

that form is the one in which Cervantes originally shaped his ideas. On

the other hand, it is clear that there are many who desire to have not

merely the story he tells, but the story as he tells it, so far at least

as differences of idiom and circumstances permit, and who will give a

preference to the conscientious translator, even though he may have

acquitted himself somewhat awkwardly.

But after all there is no real antagonism between the two classes; there

is no reason why what pleases the one should not please the other, or why

a translator who makes it his aim to treat "Don Quixote" with the respect

due to a great classic, should not be as acceptable even to the careless

reader as the one who treats it as a famous old jest-book. It is not a

question of caviare to the general, or, if it is, the fault rests with

him who makes so. The method by which Cervantes won the ear of the

Spanish people ought, mutatis mutandis, to be equally effective with the

great majority of English readers. At any rate, even if there are readers

to whom it is a matter of indifference, fidelity to the method is as much

a part of the translator's duty as fidelity to the matter. If he can

please all parties, so much the better; but his first duty is to those

who look to him for as faithful a representation of his author as it is

in his power to give them, faithful to the letter so long as fidelity is

practicable, faithful to the spirit so far as he can make it.

My purpose here is not to dogmatise on the rules of translation, but to

indicate those I have followed, or at least tried to the best of my

ability to follow, in the present instance. One which, it seems to me,

cannot be too rigidly followed in translating "Don Quixote," is to avoid

everything that savours of affectation. The book itself is, indeed, in

one sense a protest against it, and no man abhorred it more than

Cervantes. For this reason, I think, any temptation to use antiquated or

obsolete language should be resisted. It is after all an affectation, and

one for which there is no warrant or excuse. Spanish has probably

undergone less change since the seventeenth century than any language in

Europe, and by far the greater and certainly the best part of "Don

Quixote" differs but little in language from the colloquial Spanish of

the present day. Except in the tales and Don Quixote's speeches, the

translator who uses the simplest and plainest everyday language will

almost always be the one who approaches nearest to the original.

Seeing that the story of "Don Quixote" and all its characters and

incidents have now been for more than two centuries and a half familiar

as household words in English mouths, it seems to me that the old

familiar names and phrases should not be changed without good reason. Of

course a translator who holds that "Don Quixote" should receive the

treatment a great classic deserves, will feel himself bound by the

injunction laid upon the Morisco in Chap. IX not to omit or add anything.

II: ABOUT CERVANTES AND DON QUIXOTE

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 at a very early date; but I think

the balance of the evidence tends to show that the "solar," the original

site of the family, was at Cervatos in the north-west corner of Old

Castile, close to the junction of Castile, Leon, and the Asturias. As it

happens, there is a complete history of the Cervantes family from the

tenth century down to the seventeenth extant under the title of

"Illustrious Ancestry, Glorious Deeds, and Noble Posterity of the Famous

Nuno Alfonso, Alcaide of Toledo," written in 1648 by the industrious

genealogist Rodrigo Mendez Silva, who availed himself of a manuscript

genealogy by Juan de Mena, the poet laureate and historiographer of John

II.

The origin of the name Cervantes is curious. Nuno Alfonso was almost as

distinguished in the struggle against the Moors in the reign of Alfonso

VII as the Cid had been half a century before in that of Alfonso VI, and

was rewarded by divers grants of land in the neighbourhood of Toledo. On

one of his acquisitions, about two leagues from the city, he built

himself a castle which he called Cervatos, because "he was lord of the

solar of Cervatos in the Montana," as the mountain region extending from

the Basque Provinces to Leon was always called. At his death in battle in

1143, the castle passed by his will to his son Alfonso Munio, who, as

territorial or local surnames were then coming into vogue in place of the

simple patronymic, took the additional name of Cervatos. His eldest son

Pedro succeeded him in the possession of the castle, and followed his

example in adopting the name, an assumption at which the younger son,

Gonzalo, seems to have taken umbrage.

Everyone who has paid even a flying visit to Toledo will remember the

ruined castle that crowns the hill above the spot where the bridge of

Alcantara spans the gorge of the Tagus, and with its broken outline and

crumbling walls makes such an admirable pendant to the square solid

Alcazar towering over the city roofs on the opposite side. It was built,

or as some say restored, by Alfonso VI shortly after his occupation of

Toledo in 1085, and called by him San Servando after a Spanish martyr, a

name subsequently modified into San Servan (in which form it appears in

the "Poem of the Cid"), San Servantes, and San Cervantes: with regard to

which last the "Handbook for Spain" warns its readers against the

supposition that it has anything to do with the author of "Don Quixote."

Ford, as all know who have taken him for a companion and counsellor on

the roads of Spain, is seldom wrong in matters of literature or history.

In this instance, however, he is in error. It has everything to do with

the author of "Don Quixote," for it is in fact these old walls that have

given to Spain the name she is proudest of to-day. Gonzalo, above

mentioned, it may be readily conceived, did not relish the appropriation

by his brother of a name to which he himself had an equal right, for

though nominally taken from the castle, it was in reality derived from

the ancient territorial possession of the family, and as a set-off, and

to distinguish himself (diferenciarse) from his brother, he took as a

surname the name of the castle on the bank of the Tagus, in the building

of which, according to a family tradition, his great-grandfather had a

share.

Both brothers founded families. The Cervantes branch had more tenacity;

it sent offshoots in various directions, Andalusia, Estremadura, Galicia,

and Portugal, and produced a goodly line of men distinguished in the

service of Church and State. Gonzalo himself, and apparently a son of

his, followed Ferdinand III in the great campaign of 1236-48 that gave

Cordova and Seville to Christian Spain and penned up the Moors in the

kingdom of Granada, and his descendants intermarried with some of the

noblest families of the Peninsula and numbered among them soldiers,

magistrates, and Church dignitaries, including at least two

cardinal-archbishops.

Of the line that settled in Andalusia, Deigo de Cervantes, Commander of

the Order of Santiago, married Juana Avellaneda, daughter of Juan Arias

de Saavedra, and had several sons, of whom one was Gonzalo Gomez,

Corregidor of Jerez and ancestor of the Mexican and Columbian branches of

the family; and another, Juan, whose son Rodrigo married Dona Leonor de

Cortinas, and by her had four children, Rodrigo, Andrea, Luisa, and

Miguel, our author.

The pedigree of Cervantes is not without its bearing on "Don Quixote." A

man who could look back upon an ancestry of genuine knights-errant

extending from well-nigh the time of Pelayo to the siege of Granada was

likely to have a strong feeling on the subject of the sham chivalry of

the romances. It gives a point, too, to what he says in more than one

place about families that have once been great and have tapered away

until they have come to nothing, like a pyramid. It was the case of his

own.

He was born at Alcala de Henares and baptised in the church of Santa

Maria Mayor on the 9th of October, 1547. Of his boyhood and youth we know

nothing, unless it be from the glimpse he gives us in the preface to his

"Comedies" of himself as a boy looking on with delight while Lope de

Rueda and his company set up their rude plank stage in the plaza and

acted the rustic farces which he himself afterwards took as the model of

his interludes. This first glimpse, however, is a significant one, for it

shows the early development of that love of the drama which exercised

such an influence on his life and seems to have grown stronger as he grew

older, and of which this very preface, written only a few months before

his death, is such a striking proof. He gives us to understand, too, that

he was a great reader in his youth; but of this no assurance was needed,

for the First Part of "Don Quixote" alone proves a vast amount of

miscellaneous reading, romances of chivalry, ballads, popular poetry,

chronicles, for which he had no time or opportunity except in the first

twenty years of his life; and his misquotations and mistakes in matters

of detail are always, it may be noticed, those of a man recalling the

reading of his boyhood.

Other things besides the drama were in their infancy when Cervantes was a

boy. The period of his boyhood was in every way a transition period for

Spain. The old chivalrous Spain had passed away. The new Spain was the

mightiest power the world had seen since the Roman Empire and it had not

yet been called upon to pay the price of its greatness. By the policy of

Ferdinand and Ximenez the sovereign had been made absolute, and the

Church and Inquisition adroitly adjusted to keep him so. The nobles, who

had always resisted absolutism as strenuously as they had fought the

Moors, had been divested of all political power, a like fate had befallen

the cities, the free constitutions of Castile and Aragon had been swept

away, and the only function that remained to the Cortes was that of

granting money at the King's dictation.

The transition extended to literature. Men who, like Garcilaso de la Vega

and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, followed the Italian wars, had brought back

from Italy the products of the post-Renaissance literature, which took

root and flourished and even threatened to extinguish the native growths.

Damon and Thyrsis, Phyllis and Chloe had been fairly naturalised in

Spain, together with all the devices of pastoral poetry for investing

with an air of novelty the idea of a dispairing shepherd and inflexible

shepherdess. As a set-off against this, the old historical and

traditional ballads, and the true pastorals, the songs and ballads of

peasant life, were being collected assiduously and printed in the

cancioneros that succeeded one another with increasing rapidity. But the

most notable consequence, perhaps, of the spread of printing was the

flood of romances of chivalry that had continued to pour from the press

ever since Garci Ordonez de Montalvo had resuscitated "Amadis of Gaul" at

the beginning of the century.

For a youth fond of reading, solid or light, there could have been no

better spot in Spain than Alcala de Henares in the middle of the

sixteenth century. It was then a busy, populous university town,

something more than the enterprising rival of Salamanca, and altogether a

very different place from the melancholy, silent, deserted Alcala the

traveller sees now as he goes from Madrid to Saragossa. Theology and

medicine may have been the strong points of the university, but the town

itself seems to have inclined rather to the humanities and light

literature, and as a producer of books Alcala was already beginning to

compete with the older presses of Toledo, Burgos, Salamanca and Seville.

A pendant to the picture Cervantes has given us of his first playgoings

might, no doubt, have been often seen in the streets of Alcala at that

time; a bright, eager, tawny-haired boy peering into a book-shop where

the latest volumes lay open to tempt the public, wondering, it may be,

what that little book with the woodcut of the blind beggar and his boy,

that called itself "Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, segunda impresion,"

could be about; or with eyes brimming over with merriment gazing at one

of those preposterous portraits of a knight-errant in outrageous panoply

and plumes with which the publishers of chivalry romances loved to

embellish the title-pages of their folios. If the boy was the father of

the man, the sense of the incongruous that was strong at fifty was lively

at ten, and some such reflections as these may have been the true genesis

of "Don Quixote."

For his more solid education, we are told, he went to Salamanca. But why

Rodrigo de Cervantes, who was very poor, should have sent his son to a

university a hundred and fifty miles away when he had one at his own

door, would be a puzzle, if we had any reason for supposing that he did

so. The only evidence is a vague statement by Professor Tomas Gonzalez,

that he once saw an old entry of the matriculation of a Miguel de

Cervantes. This does not appear to have been ever seen again; but even if

it had, and if the date corresponded, it would prove nothing, as there

were at least two other Miguels born about the middle of the century; one

of them, moreover, a Cervantes Saavedra, a cousin, no doubt, who was a

source of great embarrassment to the biographers.

That he was a student neither at Salamanca nor at Alcala is best proved

by his own works. No man drew more largely upon experience than he did,

and he has nowhere left a single reminiscence of student life-for the

"Tia Fingida," if it be his, is not one--nothing, not even "a college

joke," to show that he remembered days that most men remember best. All

that we know positively about his education is that Juan Lopez de Hoyos,

a professor of humanities and belles-lettres of some eminence, calls him

his "dear and beloved pupil." This was in a little collection of verses

by different hands on the death of Isabel de Valois, second queen of

Philip II, published by the professor in 1569, to which Cervantes

contributed four pieces, including an elegy, and an epitaph in the form

of a sonnet. It is only by a rare chance that a "Lycidas" finds its way

into a volume of this sort, and Cervantes was no Milton. His verses are

no worse than such things usually are; so much, at least, may be said for

them.

By the time the book appeared he had left Spain, and, as fate ordered it,

for twelve years, the most eventful ones of his life. Giulio, afterwards

Cardinal, Acquaviva had been sent at the end of 1568 to Philip II by the

Pope on a mission, partly of condolence, partly political, and on his

return to Rome, which was somewhat brusquely expedited by the King, he

took Cervantes with him as his camarero (chamberlain), the office he

himself held in the Pope's household. The post would no doubt have led to

advancement at the Papal Court had Cervantes retained it, but in the

summer of 1570 he resigned it and enlisted as a private soldier in

Captain Diego Urbina's company, belonging to Don Miguel de Moncada's

regiment, but at that time forming a part of the command of Marc Antony

Colonna. What impelled him to this step we know not, whether it was

distaste for the career before him, or purely military enthusiasm. It may

well have been the latter, for it was a stirring time; the events,

however, which led to the alliance between Spain, Venice, and the Pope,

against the common enemy, the Porte, and to the victory of the combined

fleets at Lepanto, belong rather to the history of Europe than to the

life of Cervantes. He was one of those that sailed from Messina, in

September 1571, under the command of Don John of Austria; but on the

morning of the 7th of October, when the Turkish fleet was sighted, he was

lying below ill with fever. At the news that the enemy was in sight he

rose, and, in spite of the remonstrances of his comrades and superiors,

insisted on taking his post, saying he preferred death in the service of

God and the King to health. His galley, the Marquesa, was in the thick of

the fight, and before it was over he had received three gunshot wounds,

two in the breast and one in the left hand or arm. On the morning after

the battle, according to Navarrete, he had an interview with the

commander-in-chief, Don John, who was making a personal inspection of the

wounded, one result of which was an addition of three crowns to his pay,

and another, apparently, the friendship of his general.

How severely Cervantes was wounded may be inferred from the fact, that

with youth, a vigorous frame, and as cheerful and buoyant a temperament

as ever invalid had, he was seven months in hospital at Messina before he

was discharged. He came out with his left hand permanently disabled; he

had lost the use of it, as Mercury told him in the "Viaje del Parnaso"

for the greater glory of the right. This, however, did not absolutely

unfit him for service, and in April 1572 he joined Manuel Ponce de Leon's

company of Lope de Figueroa's regiment, in which, it seems probable, his

brother Rodrigo was serving, and shared in the operations of the next

three years, including the capture of the Goletta and Tunis. Taking

advantage of the lull which followed the recapture of these places by the

Turks, he obtained leave to return to Spain, and sailed from Naples in

September 1575 on board the Sun galley, in company with his brother

Rodrigo, Pedro Carrillo de Quesada, late Governor of the Goletta, and

some others, and furnished with letters from Don John of Austria and the

Duke of Sesa, the Viceroy of Sicily, recommending him to the King for the

command of a company, on account of his services; a dono infelice as

events proved. On the 26th they fell in with a squadron of Algerine

galleys, and after a stout resistance were overpowered and carried into

Algiers.

By means of a ransomed fellow-captive the brothers contrived to inform

their family of their condition, and the poor people at Alcala at once

strove to raise the ransom money, the father disposing of all he

possessed, and the two sisters giving up their marriage portions. But

Dali Mami had found on Cervantes the letters addressed to the King by Don

John and the Duke of Sesa, and, concluding that his prize must be a

person of great consequence, when the money came he refused it scornfully

as being altogether insufficient. The owner of Rodrigo, however, was more

easily satisfied; ransom was accepted in his case, and it was arranged

between the brothers that he should return to Spain and procure a vessel

in which he was to come back to Algiers and take off Miguel and as many

of their comrades as possible. This was not the first attempt to escape

that Cervantes had made. Soon after the commencement of his captivity he

induced several of his companions to join him in trying to reach Oran,

then a Spanish post, on foot; but after the first day's journey, the Moor

who had agreed to act as their guide deserted them, and they had no

choice but to return. The second attempt was more disastrous. In a garden

outside the city on the sea-shore, he constructed, with the help of the

gardener, a Spaniard, a hiding-place, to which he brought, one by one,

fourteen of his fellow-captives, keeping them there in secrecy for

several months, and supplying them with food through a renegade known as

El Dorador, "the Gilder." How he, a captive himself, contrived to do all

this, is one of the mysteries of the story. Wild as the project may

appear, it was very nearly successful. The vessel procured by Rodrigo

made its appearance off the coast, and under cover of night was

proceeding to take off the refugees, when the crew were alarmed by a

passing fishing boat, and beat a hasty retreat. On renewing the attempt

shortly afterwards, they, or a portion of them at least, were taken

prisoners, and just as the poor fellows in the garden were exulting in

the thought that in a few moments more freedom would be within their

grasp, they found themselves surrounded by Turkish troops, horse and

foot. The Dorador had revealed the whole scheme to the Dey Hassan.

When Cervantes saw what had befallen them, he charged his companions to

lay all the blame upon him, and as they were being bound he declared

aloud that the whole plot was of his contriving, and that nobody else had

any share in it. Brought before the Dey, he said the same. He was

threatened with impalement and with torture; and as cutting off ears and

noses were playful freaks with the Algerines, it may be conceived what

their tortures were like; but nothing could make him swerve from his

original statement that he and he alone was responsible. The upshot was

that the unhappy gardener was hanged by his master, and the prisoners

taken possession of by the Dey, who, however, afterwards restored most of

them to their masters, but kept Cervantes, paying Dali Mami 500 crowns

for him. He felt, no doubt, that a man of such resource, energy, and

daring, was too dangerous a piece of property to be left in private

hands; and he had him heavily ironed and lodged in his own prison. If he

thought that by these means he could break the spirit or shake the

resolution of his prisoner, he was soon undeceived, for Cervantes

contrived before long to despatch a letter to the Governor of Oran,

entreating him to send him some one that could be trusted, to enable him

and three other gentlemen, fellow-captives of his, to make their escape;

intending evidently to renew his first attempt with a more trustworthy

guide. Unfortunately the Moor who carried the letter was stopped just

outside Oran, and the letter being found upon him, he was sent back to

Algiers, where by the order of the Dey he was promptly impaled as a

warning to others, while Cervantes was condemned to receive two thousand

blows of the stick, a number which most likely would have deprived the

world of "Don Quixote," had not some persons, who they were we know not,

interceded on his behalf.

After this he seems to have been kept in still closer confinement than

before, for nearly two years passed before he made another attempt. This

time his plan was to purchase, by the aid of a Spanish renegade and two

Valencian merchants resident in Algiers, an armed vessel in which he and

about sixty of the leading captives were to make their escape; but just

as they were about to put it into execution one Doctor Juan Blanco de

Paz, an ecclesiastic and a compatriot, informed the Dey of the plot.

Cervantes by force of character, by his self-devotion, by his untiring

energy and his exertions to lighten the lot of his companions in misery,

had endeared himself to all, and become the leading spirit in the captive

colony, and, incredible as it may seem, jealousy of his influence and the

esteem in which he was held, moved this man to compass his destruction by

a cruel death. The merchants finding that the Dey knew all, and fearing

that Cervantes under torture might make disclosures that would imperil

their own lives, tried to persuade him to slip away on board a vessel

that was on the point of sailing for Spain; but he told them they had

nothing to fear, for no tortures would make him compromise anybody, and

he went at once and gave himself up to the Dey.

As before, the Dey tried to force him to name his accomplices. Everything

was made ready for his immediate execution; the halter was put round his

neck and his hands tied behind him, but all that could be got from him

was that he himself, with the help of four gentlemen who had since left

Algiers, had arranged the whole, and that the sixty who were to accompany

him were not to know anything of it until the last moment. Finding he

could make nothing of him, the Dey sent him back to prison more heavily

ironed than before.

The poverty-stricken Cervantes family had been all this time trying once

more to raise the ransom money, and at last a sum of three hundred ducats

was got together and entrusted to the Redemptorist Father Juan Gil, who

was about to sail for Algiers. The Dey, however, demanded more than

double the sum offered, and as his term of office had expired and he was

about to sail for Constantinople, taking all his slaves with him, the

case of Cervantes was critical. He was already on board heavily ironed,

when the Dey at length agreed to reduce his demand by one-half, and

Father Gil by borrowing was able to make up the amount, and on September

19, 1580, after a captivity of five years all but a week, Cervantes was

at last set free. Before long he discovered that Blanco de Paz, who

claimed to be an officer of the Inquisition, was now concocting on false

evidence a charge of misconduct to be brought against him on his return

to Spain. To checkmate him Cervantes drew up a series of twenty-five

questions, covering the whole period of his captivity, upon which he

requested Father Gil to take the depositions of credible witnesses before

a notary. Eleven witnesses taken from among the principal captives in

Algiers deposed to all the facts above stated and to a great deal more

besides. There is something touching in the admiration, love, and

gratitude we see struggling to find expression in the formal language of

the notary, as they testify one after another to the good deeds of

Cervantes, how he comforted and helped the weak-hearted, how he kept up

their drooping courage, how he shared his poor purse with this deponent,

and how "in him this deponent found father and mother."

On his return to Spain he found his old regiment about to march for

Portugal to support Philip's claim to the crown, and utterly penniless

now, had no choice but to rejoin it. He was in the expeditions to the

Azores in 1582 and the following year, and on the conclusion of the war

returned to Spain in the autumn of 1583, bringing with him the manuscript

of his pastoral romance, the "Galatea," and probably also, to judge by

internal evidence, that of the first portion of "Persiles and

Sigismunda." He also brought back with him, his biographers assert, an

infant daughter, the offspring of an amour, as some of them with great

circumstantiality inform us, with a Lisbon lady of noble birth, whose

name, however, as well as that of the street she lived in, they omit to

mention. The sole foundation for all this is that in 1605 there certainly

was living in the family of Cervantes a Dona Isabel de Saavedra, who is

described in an official document as his natural daughter, and then

twenty years of age.

With his crippled left hand promotion in the army was hopeless, now that

Don John was dead and he had no one to press his claims and services, and

for a man drawing on to forty life in the ranks was a dismal prospect; he

had already a certain reputation as a poet; he made up his mind,

therefore, to cast his lot with literature, and for a first venture

committed his "Galatea" to the press. It was published, as Salva y Mallen

shows conclusively, at Alcala, his own birth-place, in 1585 and no doubt

helped to make his name more widely known, but certainly did not do him

much good in any other way.

While it was going through the press, he married Dona Catalina de

Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano, a lady of Esquivias near Madrid, and

apparently a friend of the family, who brought him a fortune which may

possibly have served to keep the wolf from the door, but if so, that was

all. The drama had by this time outgrown market-place stages and

strolling companies, and with his old love for it he naturally turned to

it for a congenial employment. In about three years he wrote twenty or

thirty plays, which he tells us were performed without any throwing of

cucumbers or other missiles, and ran their course without any hisses,

outcries, or disturbance. In other words, his plays were not bad enough

to be hissed off the stage, but not good enough to hold their own upon

it. Only two of them have been preserved, but as they happen to be two of

the seven or eight he mentions with complacency, we may assume they are

favourable specimens, and no one who reads the "Numancia" and the "Trato

de Argel" will feel any surprise that they failed as acting dramas.

Whatever merits they may have, whatever occasional they may show, they

are, as regards construction, incurably clumsy. How completely they

failed is manifest from the fact that with all his sanguine temperament

and indomitable perseverance he was unable to maintain the struggle to

gain a livelihood as a dramatist for more than three years; nor was the

rising popularity of Lope the cause, as is often said, notwithstanding

his own words to the contrary. When Lope began to write for the stage is

uncertain, but it was certainly after Cervantes went to Seville.

Among the "Nuevos Documentos" printed by Senor Asensio y Toledo is one

dated 1592, and curiously characteristic of Cervantes. It is an agreement

with one Rodrigo Osorio, a manager, who was to accept six comedies at

fifty ducats (about 6l.) apiece, not to be paid in any case unless it

appeared on representation that the said comedy was one of the best that

had ever been represented in Spain. The test does not seem to have been

ever applied; perhaps it was sufficiently apparent to Rodrigo Osorio that

the comedies were not among the best that had ever been represented.

Among the correspondence of Cervantes there might have been found, no

doubt, more than one letter like that we see in the "Rake's Progress,"

"Sir, I have read your play, and it will not doo."

He was more successful in a literary contest at Saragossa in 1595 in

honour of the canonisation of St. Jacinto, when his composition won the

first prize, three silver spoons. The year before this he had been

appointed a collector of revenues for the kingdom of Granada. In order to

remit the money he had collected more conveniently to the treasury, he

entrusted it to a merchant, who failed and absconded; and as the

bankrupt's assets were insufficient to cover the whole, he was sent to

prison at Seville in September 1597. The balance against him, however,

was a small one, about 26l., and on giving security for it he was

released at the end of the year.

It was as he journeyed from town to town collecting the king's taxes,

that he noted down those bits of inn and wayside life and character that

abound in the pages of "Don Quixote:" the Benedictine monks with

spectacles and sunshades, mounted on their tall mules; the strollers in

costume bound for the next village; the barber with his basin on his

head, on his way to bleed a patient; the recruit with his breeches in his

bundle, tramping along the road singing; the reapers gathered in the

venta gateway listening to "Felixmarte of Hircania" read out to them; and

those little Hogarthian touches that he so well knew how to bring in, the

ox-tail hanging up with the landlord's comb stuck in it, the wine-skins

at the bed-head, and those notable examples of hostelry art, Helen going

off in high spirits on Paris's arm, and Dido on the tower dropping tears

as big as walnuts. Nay, it may well be that on those journeys into remote

regions he came across now and then a specimen of the pauper gentleman,

with his lean hack and his greyhound and his books of chivalry, dreaming

away his life in happy ignorance that the world had changed since his

great-grandfather's old helmet was new. But it was in Seville that he

found out his true vocation, though he himself would not by any means

have admitted it to be so. It was there, in Triana, that he was first

tempted to try his hand at drawing from life, and first brought his

humour into play in the exquisite little sketch of "Rinconete y

Cortadillo," the germ, in more ways than one, of "Don Quixote."

Where and when that was written, we cannot tell. After his imprisonment

all trace of Cervantes in his official capacity disappears, from which it

may be inferred that he was not reinstated. That he was still in Seville

in November 1598 appears from a satirical sonnet of his on the elaborate

catafalque erected to testify the grief of the city at the death of

Philip II, but from this up to 1603 we have no clue to his movements. The

words in the preface to the First Part of "Don Quixote" are generally

held to be conclusive that he conceived the idea of the book, and wrote

the beginning of it at least, in a prison, and that he may have done so

is extremely likely.

There is a tradition that Cervantes read some portions of his work to a

select audience at the Duke of Bejar's, which may have helped to make the

book known; but the obvious conclusion is that the First Part of "Don

Quixote" lay on his hands some time before he could find a publisher bold

enough to undertake a venture of so novel a character; and so little

faith in it had Francisco Robles of Madrid, to whom at last he sold it,

that he did not care to incur the expense of securing the copyright for

Aragon or Portugal, contenting himself with that for Castile. The

printing was finished in December, and the book came out with the new

year, 1605. It is often said that "Don Quixote" was at first received

coldly. The facts show just the contrary. No sooner was it in the hands

of the public than preparations were made to issue pirated editions at

Lisbon and Valencia, and to bring out a second edition with the

additional copyrights for Aragon and Portugal, which he secured in

February.

No doubt it was received with something more than coldness by certain

sections of the community. Men of wit, taste, and discrimination among

the aristocracy gave it a hearty welcome, but the aristocracy in general

were not likely to relish a book that turned their favourite reading into

ridicule and laughed at so many of their favourite ideas. The dramatists

who gathered round Lope as their leader regarded Cervantes as their

common enemy, and it is plain that he was equally obnoxious to the other

clique, the culto poets who had Gongora for their chief. Navarrete, who

knew nothing of the letter above mentioned, tries hard to show that the

relations between Cervantes and Lope were of a very friendly sort, as

indeed they were until "Don Quixote" was written. Cervantes, indeed, to

the last generously and manfully declared his admiration of Lope's

powers, his unfailing invention, and his marvellous fertility; but in the

preface of the First Part of "Don Quixote" and in the verses of "Urganda

the Unknown," and one or two other places, there are, if we read between

the lines, sly hits at Lope's vanities and affectations that argue no

personal good-will; and Lope openly sneers at "Don Quixote" and

Cervantes, and fourteen years after his death gives him only a few lines

of cold commonplace in the "Laurel de Apolo," that seem all the colder

for the eulogies of a host of nonentities whose names are found nowhere

else.

In 1601 Valladolid was made the seat of the Court, and at the beginning

of 1603 Cervantes had been summoned thither in connection with the

balance due by him to the Treasury, which was still outstanding. He

remained at Valladolid, apparently supporting himself by agencies and

scrivener's work of some sort; probably drafting petitions and drawing up

statements of claims to be presented to the Council, and the like. So, at

least, we gather from the depositions taken on the occasion of the death

of a gentleman, the victim of a street brawl, who had been carried into

the house in which he lived. In these he himself is described as a man

who wrote and transacted business, and it appears that his household then

consisted of his wife, the natural daughter Isabel de Saavedra already

mentioned, his sister Andrea, now a widow, her daughter Constanza, a

mysterious Magdalena de Sotomayor calling herself his sister, for whom

his biographers cannot account, and a servant-maid.

Meanwhile "Don Quixote" had been growing in favour, and its author's name

was now known beyond the Pyrenees. In 1607 an edition was printed at

Brussels. Robles, the Madrid publisher, found it necessary to meet the

demand by a third edition, the seventh in all, in 1608. The popularity of

the book in Italy was such that a Milan bookseller was led to bring out

an edition in 1610; and another was called for in Brussels in 1611. It

might naturally have been expected that, with such proofs before him that

he had hit the taste of the public, Cervantes would have at once set

about redeeming his rather vague promise of a second volume.

But, to all appearance, nothing was farther from his thoughts. He had

still by him one or two short tales of the same vintage as those he had

inserted in "Don Quixote" and instead of continuing the adventures of Don

Quixote, he set to work to write more of these "Novelas Exemplares" as he

afterwards called them, with a view to making a book of them.

The novels were published in the summer of 1613, with a dedication to the

Conde de Lemos, the Maecenas of the day, and with one of those chatty

confidential prefaces Cervantes was so fond of. In this, eight years and

a half after the First Part of "Don Quixote" had appeared, we get the

first hint of a forthcoming Second Part. "You shall see shortly," he

says, "the further exploits of Don Quixote and humours of Sancho Panza."

His idea of "shortly" was a somewhat elastic one, for, as we know by the

date to Sancho's letter, he had barely one-half of the book completed

that time twelvemonth.

But more than poems, or pastorals, or novels, it was his dramatic

ambition that engrossed his thoughts. The same indomitable spirit that

kept him from despair in the bagnios of Algiers, and prompted him to

attempt the escape of himself and his comrades again and again, made him

persevere in spite of failure and discouragement in his efforts to win

the ear of the public as a dramatist. The temperament of Cervantes was

essentially sanguine. The portrait he draws in the preface to the novels,

with the aquiline features, chestnut hair, smooth untroubled forehead,

and bright cheerful eyes, is the very portrait of a sanguine man. Nothing

that the managers might say could persuade him that the merits of his

plays would not be recognised at last if they were only given a fair

chance. The old soldier of the Spanish Salamis was bent on being the

Aeschylus of Spain. He was to found a great national drama, based on the

true principles of art, that was to be the envy of all nations; he was to

drive from the stage the silly, childish plays, the "mirrors of nonsense

and models of folly" that were in vogue through the cupidity of the

managers and shortsightedness of the authors; he was to correct and

educate the public taste until it was ripe for tragedies on the model of

the Greek drama--like the "Numancia" for instance--and comedies that

would not only amuse but improve and instruct. All this he was to do,

could he once get a hearing: there was the initial difficulty.

He shows plainly enough, too, that "Don Quixote" and the demolition of

the chivalry romances was not the work that lay next his heart. He was,

indeed, as he says himself in his preface, more a stepfather than a

father to "Don Quixote." Never was great work so neglected by its author.

That it was written carelessly, hastily, and by fits and starts, was not

always his fault, but it seems clear he never read what he sent to the

press. He knew how the printers had blundered, but he never took the

trouble to correct them when the third edition was in progress, as a man

who really cared for the child of his brain would have done. He appears

to have regarded the book as little more than a mere libro de

entretenimiento, an amusing book, a thing, as he says in the "Viaje," "to

divert the melancholy moody heart at any time or season." No doubt he had

an affection for his hero, and was very proud of Sancho Panza. It would

have been strange indeed if he had not been proud of the most humorous

creation in all fiction. He was proud, too, of the popularity and success

of the book, and beyond measure delightful is the naivete with which he

shows his pride in a dozen passages in the Second Part. But it was not

the success he coveted. In all probability he would have given all the

success of "Don Quixote," nay, would have seen every copy of "Don

Quixote" burned in the Plaza Mayor, for one such success as Lope de Vega

was enjoying on an average once a week.

And so he went on, dawdling over "Don Quixote," adding a chapter now and

again, and putting it aside to turn to "Persiles and Sigismunda"--which,

as we know, was to be the most entertaining book in the language, and the

rival of "Theagenes and Chariclea"--or finishing off one of his darling

comedies; and if Robles asked when "Don Quixote" would be ready, the

answer no doubt was: En breve-shortly, there was time enough for that. At

sixty-eight he was as full of life and hope and plans for the future as a

boy of eighteen.

Nemesis was coming, however. He had got as far as Chapter LIX, which at

his leisurely pace he could hardly have reached before October or

November 1614, when there was put into his hand a small octave lately

printed at Tarragona, and calling itself "Second Volume of the Ingenious

Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha: by the Licentiate Alonso Fernandez de

Avellaneda of Tordesillas." The last half of Chapter LIX and most of the

following chapters of the Second Part give us some idea of the effect

produced upon him, and his irritation was not likely to be lessened by

the reflection that he had no one to blame but himself. Had Avellaneda,

in fact, been content with merely bringing out a continuation to "Don

Quixote," Cervantes would have had no reasonable grievance. His own

intentions were expressed in the very vaguest language at the end of the

book; nay, in his last words, "forse altro cantera con miglior plettro,"

he seems actually to invite some one else to continue the work, and he

made no sign until eight years and a half had gone by; by which time

Avellaneda's volume was no doubt written.

In fact Cervantes had no case, or a very bad one, as far as the mere

continuation was concerned. But Avellaneda chose to write a preface to

it, full of such coarse personal abuse as only an ill-conditioned man

could pour out. He taunts Cervantes with being old, with having lost his

hand, with having been in prison, with being poor, with being friendless,

accuses him of envy of Lope's success, of petulance and querulousness,

and so on; and it was in this that the sting lay. Avellaneda's reason for

this personal attack is obvious enough. Whoever he may have been, it is

clear that he was one of the dramatists of Lope's school, for he has the

impudence to charge Cervantes with attacking him as well as Lope in his

criticism on the drama. His identification has exercised the best critics

and baffled all the ingenuity and research that has been brought to bear

on it. Navarrete and Ticknor both incline to the belief that Cervantes

knew who he was; but I must say I think the anger he shows suggests an

invisible assailant; it is like the irritation of a man stung by a

mosquito in the dark. Cervantes from certain solecisms of language

pronounces him to be an Aragonese, and Pellicer, an Aragonese himself,

supports this view and believes him, moreover, to have been an

ecclesiastic, a Dominican probably.

Any merit Avellaneda has is reflected from Cervantes, and he is too dull

to reflect much. "Dull and dirty" will always be, I imagine, the verdict

of the vast majority of unprejudiced readers. He is, at best, a poor

plagiarist; all he can do is to follow slavishly the lead given him by

Cervantes; his only humour lies in making Don Quixote take inns for

castles and fancy himself some legendary or historical personage, and

Sancho mistake words, invert proverbs, and display his gluttony; all

through he shows a proclivity to coarseness and dirt, and he has

contrived to introduce two tales filthier than anything by the sixteenth

century novellieri and without their sprightliness.

But whatever Avellaneda and his book may be, we must not forget the debt

we owe them. But for them, there can be no doubt, "Don Quixote" would

have come to us a mere torso instead of a complete work. Even if

Cervantes had finished the volume he had in hand, most assuredly he would

have left off with a promise of a Third Part, giving the further

adventures of Don Quixote and humours of Sancho Panza as shepherds. It is

plain that he had at one time an intention of dealing with the pastoral

romances as he had dealt with the books of chivalry, and but for

Avellaneda he would have tried to carry it out. But it is more likely

that, with his plans, and projects, and hopefulness, the volume would

have remained unfinished till his death, and that we should have never

made the acquaintance of the Duke and Duchess, or gone with Sancho to

Barataria.

From the moment the book came into his hands he seems to have been

haunted by the fear that there might be more Avellanedas in the field,

and putting everything else aside, he set himself to finish off his task

and protect Don Quixote in the only way he could, by killing him. The

conclusion is no doubt a hasty and in some places clumsy piece of work

and the frequent repetition of the scolding administered to Avellaneda

becomes in the end rather wearisome; but it is, at any rate, a conclusion

and for that we must thank Avellaneda.

The new volume was ready for the press in February, but was not printed

till the very end of 1615, and during the interval Cervantes put together

the comedies and interludes he had written within the last few years,

and, as he adds plaintively, found no demand for among the managers, and

published them with a preface, worth the book it introduces tenfold, in

which he gives an account of the early Spanish stage, and of his own

attempts as a dramatist. It is needless to say they were put forward by

Cervantes in all good faith and full confidence in their merits. The

reader, however, was not to suppose they were his last word or final

effort in the drama, for he had in hand a comedy called "Engano a los

ojos," about which, if he mistook not, there would be no question.

Of this dramatic masterpiece the world has no opportunity of judging; his

health had been failing for some time, and he died, apparently of dropsy,

on the 23rd of April, 1616, the day on which England lost Shakespeare,

nominally at least, for the English calendar had not yet been reformed.

He died as he had lived, accepting his lot bravely and cheerfully.

Was it an unhappy life, that of Cervantes? His biographers all tell us

that it was; but I must say I doubt it. It was a hard life, a life of

poverty, of incessant struggle, of toil ill paid, of disappointment, but

Cervantes carried within himself the antidote to all these evils. His was

not one of those light natures that rise above adversity merely by virtue

of their own buoyancy; it was in the fortitude of a high spirit that he

was proof against it. It is impossible to conceive Cervantes giving way

to despondency or prostrated by dejection. As for poverty, it was with

him a thing to be laughed over, and the only sigh he ever allows to

escape him is when he says, "Happy he to whom Heaven has given a piece of

bread for which he is not bound to give thanks to any but Heaven itself."

Add to all this his vital energy and mental activity, his restless

invention and his sanguine temperament, and there will be reason enough

to doubt whether his could have been a very unhappy life. He who could

take Cervantes' distresses together with his apparatus for enduring them

would not make so bad a bargain, perhaps, as far as happiness in life is

concerned.

Of his burial-place nothing is known except that he was buried, in

accordance with his will, in the neighbouring convent of Trinitarian

nuns, of which it is supposed his daughter, Isabel de Saavedra, was an

inmate, and that a few years afterwards the nuns removed to another

convent, carrying their dead with them. But whether the remains of

Cervantes were included in the removal or not no one knows, and the clue

to their resting-place is now lost beyond all hope. This furnishes

perhaps the least defensible of the items in the charge of neglect

brought against his contemporaries. In some of the others there is a good

deal of exaggeration. To listen to most of his biographers one would

suppose that all Spain was in league not only against the man but against

his memory, or at least that it was insensible to his merits, and left

him to live in misery and die of want. To talk of his hard life and

unworthy employments in Andalusia is absurd. What had he done to

distinguish him from thousands of other struggling men earning a

precarious livelihood? True, he was a gallant soldier, who had been

wounded and had undergone captivity and suffering in his country's cause,

but there were hundreds of others in the same case. He had written a

mediocre specimen of an insipid class of romance, and some plays which

manifestly did not comply with the primary condition of pleasing: were

the playgoers to patronise plays that did not amuse them, because the

author was to produce "Don Quixote" twenty years afterwards?

The scramble for copies which, as we have seen, followed immediately on

the appearance of the book, does not look like general insensibility to

its merits. No doubt it was received coldly by some, but if a man writes

a book in ridicule of periwigs he must make his account with being coldly

received by the periwig wearers and hated by the whole tribe of

wigmakers. If Cervantes had the chivalry-romance readers, the

sentimentalists, the dramatists, and the poets of the period all against

him, it was because "Don Quixote" was what it was; and if the general

public did not come forward to make him comfortable for the rest of his

days, it is no more to be charged with neglect and ingratitude than the

English-speaking public that did not pay off Scott's liabilities. It did

the best it could; it read his book and liked it and bought it, and

encouraged the bookseller to pay him well for others.

It has been also made a reproach to Spain that she has erected no

monument to the man she is proudest of; no monument, that is to say, of

him; for the bronze statue in the little garden of the Plaza de las

Cortes, a fair work of art no doubt, and unexceptionable had it been set

up to the local poet in the market-place of some provincial town, is not

worthy of Cervantes or of Madrid. But what need has Cervantes of "such

weak witness of his name;" or what could a monument do in his case except

testify to the self-glorification of those who had put it up? Si

monumentum quoeris, circumspice. The nearest bookseller's shop will show

what bathos there would be in a monument to the author of "Don Quixote."

Nine editions of the First Part of "Don Quixote" had already appeared

before Cervantes died, thirty thousand copies in all, according to his

own estimate, and a tenth was printed at Barcelona the year after his

death. So large a number naturally supplied the demand for some time, but

by 1634 it appears to have been exhausted; and from that time down to the

present day the stream of editions has continued to flow rapidly and

regularly. The translations show still more clearly in what request the

book has been from the very outset. In seven years from the completion of

the work it had been translated into the four leading languages of

Europe. Except the Bible, in fact, no book has been so widely diffused as

"Don Quixote." The "Imitatio Christi" may have been translated into as

many different languages, and perhaps "Robinson Crusoe" and the "Vicar of

Wakefield" into nearly as many, but in multiplicity of translations and

editions "Don Quixote" leaves them all far behind.

Still more remarkable is the character of this wide diffusion. "Don

Quixote" has been thoroughly naturalised among people whose ideas about

knight-errantry, if they had any at all, were of the vaguest, who had

never seen or heard of a book of chivalry, who could not possibly feel

the humour of the burlesque or sympathise with the author's purpose.

Another curious fact is that this, the most cosmopolitan book in the

world, is one of the most intensely national. "Manon Lescaut" is not more

thoroughly French, "Tom Jones" not more English, "Rob Roy" not more

Scotch, than "Don Quixote" is Spanish, in character, in ideas, in

sentiment, in local colour, in everything. What, then, is the secret of

this unparalleled popularity, increasing year by year for well-nigh three

centuries? One explanation, no doubt, is that of all the books in the

world, "Don Quixote" is the most catholic. There is something in it for

every sort of reader, young or old, sage or simple, high or low. As

Cervantes himself says with a touch of pride, "It is thumbed and read and

got by heart by people of all sorts; the children turn its leaves, the

young people read it, the grown men understand it, the old folk praise

it."

But it would be idle to deny that the ingredient which, more than its

humour, or its wisdom, or the fertility of invention or knowledge of

human nature it displays, has insured its success with the multitude, is

the vein of farce that runs through it. It was the attack upon the sheep,

the battle with the wine-skins, Mambrino's helmet, the balsam of

Fierabras, Don Quixote knocked over by the sails of the windmill, Sancho

tossed in the blanket, the mishaps and misadventures of master and man,

that were originally the great attraction, and perhaps are so still to

some extent with the majority of readers. It is plain that "Don Quixote"

was generally regarded at first, and indeed in Spain for a long time, as

little more than a queer droll book, full of laughable incidents and

absurd situations, very amusing, but not entitled to much consideration

or care. All the editions printed in Spain from 1637 to 1771, when the

famous printer Ibarra took it up, were mere trade editions, badly and

carelessly printed on vile paper and got up in the style of chap-books

intended only for popular use, with, in most instances, uncouth

illustrations and clap-trap additions by the publisher.

To England belongs the credit of having been the first country to

recognise the right of "Don Quixote" to better treatment than this. The

London edition of 1738, commonly called Lord Carteret's from having been

suggested by him, was not a mere edition de luxe. It produced "Don

Quixote" in becoming form as regards paper and type, and embellished with

plates which, if not particularly happy as illustrations, were at least

well intentioned and well executed, but it also aimed at correctness of

text, a matter to which nobody except the editors of the Valencia and

Brussels editions had given even a passing thought; and for a first

attempt it was fairly successful, for though some of its emendations are

inadmissible, a good many of them have been adopted by all subsequent

editors.

The zeal of publishers, editors, and annotators brought about a

remarkable change of sentiment with regard to "Don Quixote." A vast

number of its admirers began to grow ashamed of laughing over it. It

became almost a crime to treat it as a humorous book. The humour was not

entirely denied, but, according to the new view, it was rated as an

altogether secondary quality, a mere accessory, nothing more than the

stalking-horse under the presentation of which Cervantes shot his

philosophy or his satire, or whatever it was he meant to shoot; for on

this point opinions varied. All were agreed, however, that the object he

aimed at was not the books of chivalry. He said emphatically in the

preface to the First Part and in the last sentence of the Second, that he

had no other object in view than to discredit these books, and this, to

advanced criticism, made it clear that his object must have been

something else.

One theory was that the book was a kind of allegory, setting forth the

eternal struggle between the ideal and the real, between the spirit of

poetry and the spirit of prose; and perhaps German philosophy never

evolved a more ungainly or unlikely camel out of the depths of its inner

consciousness. Something of the antagonism, no doubt, is to be found in

"Don Quixote," because it is to be found everywhere in life, and

Cervantes drew from life. It is difficult to imagine a community in which

the never-ceasing game of cross-purposes between Sancho Panza and Don

Quixote would not be recognized as true to nature. In the stone age,

among the lake dwellers, among the cave men, there were Don Quixotes and

Sancho Panzas; there must have been the troglodyte who never could see

the facts before his eyes, and the troglodyte who could see nothing else.

But to suppose Cervantes deliberately setting himself to expound any such

idea in two stout quarto volumes is to suppose something not only very

unlike the age in which he lived, but altogether unlike Cervantes

himself, who would have been the first to laugh at an attempt of the sort

made by anyone else.

The extraordinary influence of the romances of chivalry in his day is

quite enough to account for the genesis of the book. Some idea of the

prodigious development of this branch of literature in the sixteenth

century may be obtained from the scrutiny of Chapter VII, if the reader

bears in mind that only a portion of the romances belonging to by far the

largest group are enumerated. As to its effect upon the nation, there is

abundant evidence. From the time when the Amadises and Palmerins began to

grow popular down to the very end of the century, there is a steady

stream of invective, from men whose character and position lend weight to

their words, against the romances of chivalry and the infatuation of

their readers. Ridicule was the only besom to sweep away that dust.

That this was the task Cervantes set himself, and that he had ample

provocation to urge him to it, will be sufficiently clear to those who

look into the evidence; as it will be also that it was not chivalry

itself that he attacked and swept away. Of all the absurdities that,

thanks to poetry, will be repeated to the end of time, there is no

greater one than saying that "Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away." In

the first place there was no chivalry for him to smile away. Spain's

chivalry had been dead for more than a century. Its work was done when

Granada fell, and as chivalry was essentially republican in its nature,

it could not live under the rule that Ferdinand substituted for the free

institutions of mediaeval Spain. What he did smile away was not chivalry

but a degrading mockery of it.

The true nature of the "right arm" and the "bright array," before which,

according to the poet, "the world gave ground," and which Cervantes'

single laugh demolished, may be gathered from the words of one of his own

countrymen, Don Felix Pacheco, as reported by Captain George Carleton, in

his "Military Memoirs from 1672 to 1713." "Before the appearance in the

world of that labour of Cervantes," he said, "it was next to an

impossibility for a man to walk the streets with any delight or without

danger. There were seen so many cavaliers prancing and curvetting before

the windows of their mistresses, that a stranger would have imagined the

whole nation to have been nothing less than a race of knight-errants. But

after the world became a little acquainted with that notable history, the

man that was seen in that once celebrated drapery was pointed at as a Don

Quixote, and found himself the jest of high and low. And I verily believe

that to this, and this only, we owe that dampness and poverty of spirit

which has run through all our councils for a century past, so little

agreeable to those nobler actions of our famous ancestors."

To call "Don Quixote" a sad book, preaching a pessimist view of life,

argues a total misconception of its drift. It would be so if its moral

were that, in this world, true enthusiasm naturally leads to ridicule and

discomfiture. But it preaches nothing of the sort; its moral, so far as

it can be said to have one, is that the spurious enthusiasm that is born

of vanity and self-conceit, that is made an end in itself, not a means to

an end, that acts on mere impulse, regardless of circumstances and

consequences, is mischievous to its owner, and a very considerable

nuisance to the community at large. To those who cannot distinguish

between the one kind and the other, no doubt "Don Quixote" is a sad book;

no doubt to some minds it is very sad that a man who had just uttered so

beautiful a sentiment as that "it is a hard case to make slaves of those

whom God and Nature made free," should be ungratefully pelted by the

scoundrels his crazy philanthropy had let loose on society; but to others

of a more judicial cast it will be a matter of regret that reckless

self-sufficient enthusiasm is not oftener requited in some such way for

all the mischief it does in the world.

A very slight examination of the structure of "Don Quixote" will suffice

to show that Cervantes had no deep design or elaborate plan in his mind

when he began the book. When he wrote those lines in which "with a few

strokes of a great master he sets before us the pauper gentleman," he had

no idea of the goal to which his imagination was leading him. There can

be little doubt that all he contemplated was a short tale to range with

those he had already written, a tale setting forth the ludicrous results

that might be expected to follow the attempt of a crazy gentleman to act

the part of a knight-errant in modern life.

It is plain, for one thing, that Sancho Panza did not enter into the

original scheme, for had Cervantes thought of him he certainly would not

have omitted him in his hero's outfit, which he obviously meant to be

complete. Him we owe to the landlord's chance remark in Chapter III that

knights seldom travelled without squires. To try to think of a Don

Quixote without Sancho Panza is like trying to think of a one-bladed pair

of scissors.

The story was written at first, like the others, without any division and

without the intervention of Cide Hamete Benengeli; and it seems not

unlikely that Cervantes had some intention of bringing Dulcinea, or

Aldonza Lorenzo, on the scene in person. It was probably the ransacking

of the Don's library and the discussion on the books of chivalry that

first suggested it to him that his idea was capable of development. What,

if instead of a mere string of farcical misadventures, he were to make

his tale a burlesque of one of these books, caricaturing their style,

incidents, and spirit?

In pursuance of this change of plan, he hastily and somewhat clumsily

divided what he had written into chapters on the model of "Amadis,"

invented the fable of a mysterious Arabic manuscript, and set up Cide

Hamete Benengeli in imitation of the almost invariable practice of the

chivalry-romance authors, who were fond of tracing their books to some

recondite source. In working out the new ideas, he soon found the value

of Sancho Panza. Indeed, the keynote, not only to Sancho's part, but to

the whole book, is struck in the first words Sancho utters when he

announces his intention of taking his ass with him. "About the ass," we

are told, "Don Quixote hesitated a little, trying whether he could call

to mind any knight-errant taking with him an esquire mounted on ass-back;

but no instance occurred to his memory." We can see the whole scene at a

glance, the stolid unconsciousness of Sancho and the perplexity of his

master, upon whose perception the incongruity has just forced itself.

This is Sancho's mission throughout the book; he is an unconscious

Mephistopheles, always unwittingly making mockery of his master's

aspirations, always exposing the fallacy of his ideas by some

unintentional ad absurdum, always bringing him back to the world of fact

and commonplace by force of sheer stolidity.

By the time Cervantes had got his volume of novels off his hands, and

summoned up resolution enough to set about the Second Part in earnest,

the case was very much altered. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza had not

merely found favour, but had already become, what they have never since

ceased to be, veritable entities to the popular imagination. There was no

occasion for him now to interpolate extraneous matter; nay, his readers

told him plainly that what they wanted of him was more Don Quixote and

more Sancho Panza, and not novels, tales, or digressions. To himself,

too, his creations had become realities, and he had become proud of them,

especially of Sancho. He began the Second Part, therefore, under very

different conditions, and the difference makes itself manifest at once.

Even in translation the style will be seen to be far easier, more

flowing, more natural, and more like that of a man sure of himself and of

his audience. Don Quixote and Sancho undergo a change also. In the First

Part, Don Quixote has no character or individuality whatever. He is

nothing more than a crazy representative of the sentiments of the

chivalry romances. In all that he says and does he is simply repeating

the lesson he has learned from his books; and therefore, it is absurd to

speak of him in the gushing strain of the sentimental critics when they

dilate upon his nobleness, disinterestedness, dauntless courage, and so

forth. It was the business of a knight-errant to right wrongs, redress

injuries, and succour the distressed, and this, as a matter of course, he

makes his business when he takes up the part; a knight-errant was bound

to be intrepid, and so he feels bound to cast fear aside. Of all Byron's

melodious nonsense about Don Quixote, the most nonsensical statement is

that "'t is his virtue makes him mad!" The exact opposite is the truth;

it is his madness makes him virtuous.

In the Second Part, Cervantes repeatedly reminds the reader, as if it was

a point upon which he was anxious there should be no mistake, that his

hero's madness is strictly confined to delusions on the subject of

chivalry, and that on every other subject he is discreto, one, in fact,

whose faculty of discernment is in perfect order. The advantage of this

is that he is enabled to make use of Don Quixote as a mouthpiece for his

own reflections, and so, without seeming to digress, allow himself the

relief of digression when he requires it, as freely as in a commonplace

book.

It is true the amount of individuality bestowed upon Don Quixote is not

very great. There are some natural touches of character about him, such

as his mixture of irascibility and placability, and his curious affection

for Sancho together with his impatience of the squire's loquacity and

impertinence; but in the main, apart from his craze, he is little more

than a thoughtful, cultured gentleman, with instinctive good taste and a

great deal of shrewdness and originality of mind.

As to Sancho, it is plain, from the concluding words of the preface to

the First Part, that he was a favourite with his creator even before he

had been taken into favour by the public. An inferior genius, taking him

in hand a second time, would very likely have tried to improve him by

making him more comical, clever, amiable, or virtuous. But Cervantes was

too true an artist to spoil his work in this way. Sancho, when he

reappears, is the old Sancho with the old familiar features; but with a

difference; they have been brought out more distinctly, but at the same

time with a careful avoidance of anything like caricature; the outline

has been filled in where filling in was necessary, and, vivified by a few

touches of a master's hand, Sancho stands before us as he might in a

character portrait by Velazquez. He is a much more important and

prominent figure in the Second Part than in the First; indeed, it is his

matchless mendacity about Dulcinea that to a great extent supplies the

action of the story.

His development in this respect is as remarkable as in any other. In the

First Part he displays a great natural gift of lying. His lies are not of

the highly imaginative sort that liars in fiction commonly indulge in;

like Falstaff's, they resemble the father that begets them; they are

simple, homely, plump lies; plain working lies, in short. But in the

service of such a master as Don Quixote he develops rapidly, as we see

when he comes to palm off the three country wenches as Dulcinea and her

ladies in waiting. It is worth noticing how, flushed by his success in

this instance, he is tempted afterwards to try a flight beyond his powers

in his account of the journey on Clavileno.

In the Second Part it is the spirit rather than the incidents of the

chivalry romances that is the subject of the burlesque. Enchantments of

the sort travestied in those of Dulcinea and the Trifaldi and the cave of

Montesinos play a leading part in the later and inferior romances, and

another distinguishing feature is caricatured in Don Quixote's blind

adoration of Dulcinea. In the romances of chivalry love is either a mere

animalism or a fantastic idolatry. Only a coarse-minded man would care to

make merry with the former, but to one of Cervantes' humour the latter

was naturally an attractive subject for ridicule. Like everything else in

these romances, it is a gross exaggeration of the real sentiment of

chivalry, but its peculiar extravagance is probably due to the influence

of those masters of hyperbole, the Provencal poets. When a troubadour

professed his readiness to obey his lady in all things, he made it

incumbent upon the next comer, if he wished to avoid the imputation of

tameness and commonplace, to declare himself the slave of her will, which

the next was compelled to cap by some still stronger declaration; and so

expressions of devotion went on rising one above the other like biddings

at an auction, and a conventional language of gallantry and theory of

love came into being that in time permeated the literature of Southern

Europe, and bore fruit, in one direction in the transcendental worship of

Beatrice and Laura, and in another in the grotesque idolatry which found

exponents in writers like Feliciano de Silva. This is what Cervantes

deals with in Don Quixote's passion for Dulcinea, and in no instance has

he carried out the burlesque more happily. By keeping Dulcinea in the

background, and making her a vague shadowy being of whose very existence

we are left in doubt, he invests Don Quixote's worship of her virtues and

charms with an additional extravagance, and gives still more point to the

caricature of the sentiment and language of the romances.

One of the great merits of "Don Quixote," and one of the qualities that

have secured its acceptance by all classes of readers and made it the

most cosmopolitan of books, is its simplicity. There are, of course,

points obvious enough to a Spanish seventeenth century audience which do

not immediately strike a reader now-a-days, and Cervantes often takes it

for granted that an allusion will be generally understood which is only

intelligible to a few. For example, on many of his readers in Spain, and

most of his readers out of it, the significance of his choice of a

country for his hero is completely lost. It would be going too far to say

that no one can thoroughly comprehend "Don Quixote" without having seen

La Mancha, but undoubtedly even a glimpse of La Mancha will give an

insight into the meaning of Cervantes such as no commentator can give. Of

all the regions of Spain it is the last that would suggest the idea of

romance. Of all the dull central plateau of the Peninsula it is the

dullest tract. There is something impressive about the grim solitudes of

Estremadura; and if the plains of Leon and Old Castile are bald and

dreary, they are studded with old cities renowned in history and rich in

relics of the past. But there is no redeeming feature in the Manchegan

landscape; it has all the sameness of the desert without its dignity; the

few towns and villages that break its monotony are mean and commonplace,

there is nothing venerable about them, they have not even the

picturesqueness of poverty; indeed, Don Quixote's own village,

Argamasilla, has a sort of oppressive respectability in the prim

regularity of its streets and houses; everything is ignoble; the very

windmills are the ugliest and shabbiest of the windmill kind.

To anyone who knew the country well, the mere style and title of "Don

Quixote of La Mancha" gave the key to the author's meaning at once. La

Mancha as the knight's country and scene of his chivalries is of a piece

with the pasteboard helmet, the farm-labourer on ass-back for a squire,

knighthood conferred by a rascally ventero, convicts taken for victims of

oppression, and the rest of the incongruities between Don Quixote's world

and the world he lived in, between things as he saw them and things as

they were.

It is strange that this element of incongruity, underlying the whole

humour and purpose of the book, should have been so little heeded by the

majority of those who have undertaken to interpret "Don Quixote." It has

been completely overlooked, for example, by the illustrators. To be sure,

the great majority of the artists who illustrated "Don Quixote" knew

nothing whatever of Spain. To them a venta conveyed no idea but the

abstract one of a roadside inn, and they could not therefore do full

justice to the humour of Don Quixote's misconception in taking it for a

castle, or perceive the remoteness of all its realities from his ideal.

But even when better informed they seem to have no apprehension of the

full force of the discrepancy. Take, for instance, Gustave Dore's drawing

of Don Quixote watching his armour in the inn-yard. Whether or not the

Venta de Quesada on the Seville road is, as tradition maintains, the inn

described in "Don Quixote," beyond all question it was just such an

inn-yard as the one behind it that Cervantes had in his mind's eye, and

it was on just such a rude stone trough as that beside the primitive

draw-well in the corner that he meant Don Quixote to deposit his armour.

Gustave Dore makes it an elaborate fountain such as no arriero ever

watered his mules at in the corral of any venta in Spain, and thereby

entirely misses the point aimed at by Cervantes. It is the mean, prosaic,

commonplace character of all the surroundings and circumstances that

gives a significance to Don Quixote's vigil and the ceremony that

follows.

Cervantes' humour is for the most part of that broader and simpler sort,

the strength of which lies in the perception of the incongruous. It is

the incongruity of Sancho in all his ways, words, and works, with the

ideas and aims of his master, quite as much as the wonderful vitality and

truth to nature of the character, that makes him the most humorous

creation in the whole range of fiction. That unsmiling gravity of which

Cervantes was the first great master, "Cervantes' serious air," which

sits naturally on Swift alone, perhaps, of later humourists, is essential

to this kind of humour, and here again Cervantes has suffered at the

hands of his interpreters. Nothing, unless indeed the coarse buffoonery

of Phillips, could be more out of place in an attempt to represent

Cervantes, than a flippant, would-be facetious style, like that of

Motteux's version for example, or the sprightly, jaunty air, French

translators sometimes adopt. It is the grave matter-of-factness of the

narrative, and the apparent unconsciousness of the author that he is

saying anything ludicrous, anything but the merest commonplace, that give

its peculiar flavour to the humour of Cervantes. His, in fact, is the

exact opposite of the humour of Sterne and the self-conscious humourists.

Even when Uncle Toby is at his best, you are always aware of "the man

Sterne" behind him, watching you over his shoulder to see what effect he

is producing. Cervantes always leaves you alone with Don Quixote and

Sancho. He and Swift and the great humourists always keep themselves out

of sight, or, more properly speaking, never think about themselves at

all, unlike our latter-day school of humourists, who seem to have revived

the old horse-collar method, and try to raise a laugh by some grotesque

assumption of ignorance, imbecility, or bad taste.

It is true that to do full justice to Spanish humour in any other

language is well-nigh an impossibility. There is a natural gravity and a

sonorous stateliness about Spanish, be it ever so colloquial, that make

an absurdity doubly absurd, and give plausibility to the most

preposterous statement. This is what makes Sancho Panza's drollery the

despair of the conscientious translator. Sancho's curt comments can never

fall flat, but they lose half their flavour when transferred from their

native Castilian into any other medium. But if foreigners have failed to

do justice to the humour of Cervantes, they are no worse than his own

countrymen. Indeed, were it not for the Spanish peasant's relish of "Don

Quixote," one might be tempted to think that the great humourist was not

looked upon as a humourist at all in his own country.

The craze of Don Quixote seems, in some instances, to have communicated

itself to his critics, making them see things that are not in the book

and run full tilt at phantoms that have no existence save in their own

imaginations. Like a good many critics now-a-days, they forget that

screams are not criticism, and that it is only vulgar tastes that are

influenced by strings of superlatives, three-piled hyperboles, and

pompous epithets. But what strikes one as particularly strange is that

while they deal in extravagant eulogies, and ascribe all manner of

imaginary ideas and qualities to Cervantes, they show no perception of

the quality that ninety-nine out of a hundred of his readers would rate

highest in him, and hold to be the one that raises him above all rivalry.

To speak of "Don Quixote" as if it were merely a humorous book would be a

manifest misdescription. Cervantes at times makes it a kind of

commonplace book for occasional essays and criticisms, or for the

observations and reflections and gathered wisdom of a long and stirring

life. It is a mine of shrewd observation on mankind and human nature.

Among modern novels there may be, here and there, more elaborate studies

of character, but there is no book richer in individualised character.

What Coleridge said of Shakespeare in minimis is true of Cervantes; he

never, even for the most temporary purpose, puts forward a lay figure.

There is life and individuality in all his characters, however little

they may have to do, or however short a time they may be before the

reader. Samson Carrasco, the curate, Teresa Panza, Altisidora, even the

two students met on the road to the cave of Montesinos, all live and move

and have their being; and it is characteristic of the broad humanity of

Cervantes that there is not a hateful one among them all. Even poor

Maritornes, with her deplorable morals, has a kind heart of her own and

"some faint and distant resemblance to a Christian about her;" and as for

Sancho, though on dissection we fail to find a lovable trait in him,

unless it be a sort of dog-like affection for his master, who is there

that in his heart does not love him?

But it is, after all, the humour of "Don Quixote" that distinguishes it

from all other books of the romance kind. It is this that makes it, as

one of the most judicial-minded of modern critics calls it, "the best

novel in the world beyond all comparison." It is its varied humour,

ranging from broad farce to comedy as subtle as Shakespeare's or

Moliere's that has naturalised it in every country where there are

readers, and made it a classic in every language that has a literature.

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