CERVANTES' MASTERPIECE A BOOK FOR ALL TIME--INTENSELY
SPANISH, IT STILL APPEALS TO ALL NATIONS BY ITS DEEP
HUMAN INTEREST.
Among the great books of the world no contrast could be greater than that between St. Augustine's
Confessions and
Don Quixote by Cervantes, yet each in its way has influenced unnumbered thousands and will continue to influence other thousands so long as this world shall endure. Few great books have been so widely quoted as this masterpiece of the great Spaniard; few have contributed so many apt stories and pungent epigrams. Of the great imaginary characters of fiction none is more strongly or clearly defined than the sad-faced Knight of La Mancha and his squire, Sancho Panza. The grammar school pupil in his reading finds constant allusions to Don Quixote and his adventures, and the world's greatest writers have drawn upon this romance by Cervantes for material to point their own remarks.
In this respect the only great author Spain has produced resembles Shakespeare. His appeal is universal because the man behind the romance had tasted to the bitter dregs all that life can offer, yet his nature had remained sweet and wholesome. Byron in
Childe Harold, with his cunning trick of epigram, said that Cervantes "smiled Spain's chivalry away," but chivalry was as dead in the days of Cervantes as it is now. What the creator of
Don Quixote did was to ridicule the high-flown talk, the absurd sentimentality that marked chivalry, while at the same time he brought out, as no one else has ever done, the splendid qualities that made chivalry immortal.
Don Quixote is a man who is absolutely out of touch with the world in which he moves, but while you laugh at his absurd misconceptions you feel for him the deepest respect; you would no more laugh at the man himself than you would at poor unfortunate Lear. The idealistic quality of Don Quixote himself is enhanced by the swinish nature of Sancho Panza, who cannot understand any of his master's raptures. Into this character of the sorrowful-faced knight Cervantes put all the results of his own hard experience. The old knight is often pessimistic, but it is a genial pessimism that makes one smile; while running through the whole book is a modern note that can be found in no other book written in the early days of the seventeenth century.
That Cervantes himself was unconscious that he had produced a book that would live for centuries after he was gone is the best proof of the genius of the writer. The plays and romances which he liked the best are now forgotten, as are most of the works of Lope de Vega, the popular literary idol of his day. The book is intensely Spanish, yet its appeal is limited to no race, no creed and no age.
We have far more data in regard to the life of Cervantes than we have concerning Shakespeare, yet the Spanish author died on the same day. Cervantes came of noble family, but its fortune had vanished when he entered on life. He spent his boyhood in Valladolid and at twenty went up to Madrid, where he soon joined the train of the Papal Ambassador, Monsignor Acquaviva, and with him went to Rome, then the literary center of the world. There he learned Italian and absorbed culture as well as the prevailing enthusiasm for the crusades against the Turks, who were then menacing Venice and all the cities along the northern shore of the Mediterranean.
The leader of the Christian host was Don John of Austria, one of the great leaders of the world, who had the power of arousing the passionate devotion of his followers. Cervantes joined the Christian troops and at the battle of Lepanto, one of the great sea fights of all history, he was captain of a company of soldiers on deck and came out of the battle with two gun-shot wounds in his body and with his left hand so mutilated that it had to be cut off. Despite the fact that he was crippled, his enthusiasm still burned brightly and he saw service for the next five years.
Then, on his way home by sea, he was captured and taken to Algiers as a slave. There he fell to the share of an Albanian renegade and afterward he was sold to the Dey of Algiers. During all the five years of his Moorish captivity Cervantes was the life and soul of his fellow slaves, and he was constantly planning to free himself and his companions. The personal force of the man may be seen from the fact that the Dey declared he "should consider captives, and barks and the whole city of Algiers in perfect safety could he but be sure of that handless Spaniard." Finally Cervantes was ransomed and returned to his home at the age of thirty-five. There he married and became a naval commissary and later a tax collector. His mind soon turned to literature, and for twenty years he wrote a great variety of verses and dramas, all in the prevailing sentimental spirit of the age. At last he produced the first part of
Don Quixote at the age of fifty-eight, and he lacked only two years of seventy when the second and final part of the great romance was given to the world.
Comment has often been made on the ripe age of Cervantes when he produced his masterpiece, but Lockhart, who wrote an excellent short introduction to
Don Quixote, points out that of all the great English novelists Smollett was the only one who did first-rate work while young.
Humphrey Clinker and
Roderick Random are little read in these days, but we have a noteworthy instance of the great success of a new English novelist when past sixty years of age in William de Morgan, whose
Joseph Vance made him famous, and who has followed this with no less than three great novels:
Alice for Short,
Somehow Good and
It Never Can Happen Again. And the marvel of it is that Mr. de Morgan actually took up authorship at sixty, without any previous experience in writing. Dickens and Kipling are about the only exceptions to the rule that a novelist does his best work in mature years, but they are in a class by themselves.
Don Quixote reflects all the varying fortunes of Cervantes. The book was begun in prison, where Cervantes was cast, probably for attempting to collect debts. All his remarkable experiences in the wars against the Turks and in captivity among the Moors are embodied in the interpolated tales. The philosophy put into the mouth of the Knight of La Mancha is the fruit of Cervantes' hard experience and mature thought. He was a Spaniard with the sentiments and the prejudices of his century; but by the gift of genius he looked beyond his age and his country and, like Shakespeare, he wrote for all time and all peoples.
Nationality in literature never had a more striking example than is furnished by
Don Quixote. It is Spanish through and through; an open-air romance, much of the action of which takes place on the road or in the wayside inns where the Knight and his squire tarry for the night. It swarms with characters that were common in the Spain of the close of the sixteenth and the early days of the seventeenth centuries. Cervantes never attempts to paint the life of the court or the church; he never introduces any great dignitaries, but he is thoroughly at home with the common people, and he tells his story apparently without any effort, yet with a keen appreciation of the natural humor that seasons every scene. And yet through it all Don Quixote moves a perfect figure of gentle knighthood, a man without fear and without reproach. You laugh at him but at the same time he holds your respect. Genius can no further go than to produce a miracle like this: the creation of a character that compels your respect in the face of childish follies and hallucinations.
No one can read
Don Quixote carefully without getting rich returns from it in entertainment and culture. The humor is often coarse, but it is hearty and wholesome, and underlying all the fun is the sober conviction that the hero of all these adventures is a man whom it would have been good to know. It is difficult for any one of Anglo-Saxon strain to understand those of Latin blood, but it seems to me that the American of New England ancestry is nearer to the Spaniard than to the Frenchman or the Italian.
Underneath the surface there is a lust for adventure and an element of enduring stubbornness in the Spaniard which made him in the heyday of his nation the greatest of explorers and conquerors. And as a basis of character is his love of truth and his sterling honesty, traits that have survived through centuries of decay and degeneracy, and that may yet restore Spain to something of her old prestige among the nations of Europe. So, in reading
Don Quixote one may see in it an epitome of that old Spain which has so glorious a history in adventures that stir the blood, as in the conquests of Cortez and Pizarro, and in that higher realm of splendid sacrifice for an ideal, which witnessed the sale of Isabella's jewels to aid Columbus in his plans to discover a new world.
[The end]
George Hamlin Fitch's essay on: Don Quixote One Of The World's Great Books