CHAPTER XII.
Cervantes. — His Persiles and Sigismunda, and its Character. — His Don Quixote. — Circumstances under which it was written. — Its Purpose and General Plan. — Part First. — Avellaneda. — Part Second. — Character of the Whole. — Character of Cervantes.
Six months after the death of Cervantes,[159] the license for publishing “Persiles y Sigismunda” was granted to his widow, and in 1617 it was printed.[160] His purpose seems to have been to write a serious romance, which should be to this species of composition what the Don Quixote is to comic romance. So much, at least, may be inferred from the manner in which it is spoken of by himself and by his friends. For in the Dedication of the Second Part of Don Quixote he says, “It will be either the worst or the best book of amusement in the language”; adding, that his friends thought it admirable; and Valdivielso,[161] after his death, said he had equalled or surpassed in it all his former efforts.
But serious romantic fiction, which is peculiarly the offspring of modern civilization, was not yet far enough developed to enable one like Cervantes to obtain a high degree of success in it, especially as the natural bent of his genius was to humorous fiction. The imaginary travels of Lucian, three or four Greek romances, and the romances of chivalry, were all he had to guide him; for any thing approaching nearer to the proper modern novel than some of his own tales had not yet been imagined. Perhaps his first impulse was to write a romance of chivalry, modified by the spirit of the age, and free from the absurdities which abound in the romances that had been written before his time.[162] But if he had such a thought, the success of his own Don Quixote almost necessarily prevented him from attempting to put it in execution. He therefore looked rather to the Greek romances, and, as far as he used any model, took the “Theagenes and Chariclea” of Heliodorus.[163] He calls what he produced “A Northern Romance,” and makes its principal story consist of the sufferings of Persiles and Sigismunda,—the first the son of a king of Iceland, and the second the daughter of a king of Friesland,—laying the scene of one half of his fiction in the North of Europe, and that of the other half in the South. He has some faint ideas of the sea-kings and pirates of the Northern Ocean, but very little of the geography of the countries that produced them; and as for his savage men and frozen islands, and the wild and strange adventures he imagines to have passed among them, nothing can be more fantastic and incredible.
In Portugal, Spain, and Italy, through which his hero and heroine—disguised as they are from first to last under the names of Periandro and Auristela—make a pilgrimage to Rome, we get rid of most of the extravagances which deform the earlier portion of the romance. The whole, however, consists of a labyrinth of tales, showing, indeed, an imagination quite astonishing in an old man like Cervantes, already past his grand climacteric,—a man, too, who might be supposed to be broken down by sore calamities and incurable disease;—but it is a labyrinth from which we are glad to be extricated, and we feel relieved when the labors and trials of his Persiles and Sigismunda are over, and when, the obstacles to their love being removed, they are happily united at Rome. No doubt, amidst the multitude of separate stories with which this wild work is crowded, several are graceful in themselves, and others are interesting because they contain traces of Cervantes’s experience of life,[164] while, through the whole, his style is more carefully finished, perhaps, than in any other of his works. But, after all, it is far from being what he and his friends fancied it was,—a model of this peculiar style of fiction, and the best of his works.
This honor, if we may trust the uniform testimony of two centuries, belongs, beyond question, to his Don Quixote,—the work which, above all others, not merely of his own age, but of all modern times, bears most deeply the impression of the national character it represents, and has, therefore, in return, enjoyed a degree and extent of national favor never granted to any other.[165] When Cervantes began to write it is wholly uncertain. For twenty years preceding the appearance of the First Part he printed nothing;[166] and the little we know of him, during that long and dreary period of his life, shows only how he obtained a hard subsistence for himself and his family by common business agencies, which, we have reason to suppose, were generally of trifling importance, and which, we are sure, were sometimes distressing in their consequences. The tradition, therefore, of his persecutions in La Mancha, and his own averment that the Don Quixote was begun in a prison, are all the hints we have received concerning the circumstances under which it was first imagined; and that such circumstances should have tended to such a result is a striking fact in the history, not only of Cervantes, but of the human mind, and shows how different was his temperament from that commonly found in men of genius.
His purpose in writing the Don Quixote has sometimes been enlarged by the ingenuity of a refined criticism, until it has been made to embrace the whole of the endless contrast between the poetical and the prosaic in our natures,—between heroism and generosity on one side, as if they were mere illusions, and a cold selfishness on the other, as if it were the truth and reality of life.[167] But this is a metaphysical conclusion drawn from views of the work at once imperfect and exaggerated; a conclusion contrary to the spirit of the age, which was not given to a satire so philosophical and generalizing, and contrary to the character of Cervantes himself, as we follow it from the time when he first became a soldier, through all his trials in Algiers, and down to the moment when his warm and trusting heart dictated the Dedication of “Persiles and Sigismunda” to the Count de Lemos. His whole spirit, indeed, seems rather to have been filled with a cheerful confidence in human virtue, and his whole bearing in life seems to have been a contradiction to that discouraging and saddening scorn for whatever is elevated and generous, which such an interpretation of the Don Quixote necessarily implies.[168]
Nor does he himself permit us to give to his romance any such secret meaning; for, at the very beginning of the work, he announces it to be his sole purpose to break down the vogue and authority of books of chivalry, and, at the end of the whole, he declares anew, in his own person, that “he had had no other desire than to render abhorred of men the false and absurd stories contained in books of chivalry”;[169] exulting in his success, as an achievement of no small moment. And such, in fact, it was; for we have abundant proof that the fanaticism for these romances was so great in Spain, during the sixteenth century, as to have become matter of alarm to the more judicious. Many of the distinguished contemporary authors speak of its mischiefs, and among the rest the venerable Luis de Granada, and Malon de Chaide, who wrote the eloquent “Conversion of Mary Magdalen.”[170] Guevara, the learned and fortunate courtier of Charles the Fifth, declares that “men did read nothing in his time but such shameful books as ‘Amadis de Gaula,’ ‘Tristan,’ ‘Primaleon,’ and the like”;[171] the acute author of “The Dialogue on Languages” says that “the ten years he passed at court he wasted in studying ‘Florisando,’ ‘Lisuarte,’ ‘The Knight of the Cross,’ and other such books, more than he can name”;[172] and from different sources we know, what, indeed, we may gather from Cervantes himself, that many who read these fictions took them for true histories.[173] At last, they were deemed so noxious, that, in 1553, they were prohibited by law from being printed or sold in the American colonies, and in 1555 the same prohibition, and even the burning of all copies of them extant in Spain itself, was earnestly asked for by the Cortes.[174] The evil, in fact, had become formidable, and the wise began to see it.
To destroy a passion that had struck its roots so deeply in the character of all classes of men,[175] to break up the only reading which at that time could be considered widely popular and fashionable,[176] was certainly a bold undertaking, and one that marks any thing rather than a scornful or broken spirit, or a want of faith in what is most to be valued in our common nature. The great wonder is, that Cervantes succeeded. But that he did there is no question. No book of chivalry was written after the appearance of Don Quixote, in 1605; and from the same date, even those already enjoying the greatest favor ceased, with one or two unimportant exceptions, to be reprinted;[177] so that, from that time to the present, they have been constantly disappearing, until they are now among the rarest of literary curiosities;—a solitary instance of the power of genius to destroy, by a single well-timed blow, an entire department, and that, too, a flourishing and favored one, in the literature of a great and proud nation.
The general plan Cervantes adopted to accomplish this object, without, perhaps, foreseeing its whole course, and still less all its results, was simple as well as original. In 1605,[178] he published the First Part of Don Quixote, in which a country gentleman of La Mancha—full of genuine Castilian honor and enthusiasm, gentle and dignified in his character, trusted by his friends, and loved by his dependants—is represented as so completely crazed by long reading the most famous books of chivalry, that he believes them to be true, and feels himself called on to become the impossible knight-errant they describe,—nay, actually goes forth into the world to defend the oppressed and avenge the injured, like the heroes of his romances.
To complete his chivalrous equipment—which he had begun by fitting up for himself a suit of armour strange to his century—he took an esquire out of his neighbourhood; a middle-aged peasant, ignorant and credulous to excess, but of great good-nature; a glutton and a liar; selfish and gross, yet attached to his master; shrewd enough occasionally to see the folly of their position, but always amusing, and sometimes mischievous, in his interpretations of it. These two sally forth from their native village in search of adventures, of which the excited imagination of the knight, turning windmills into giants, solitary inns into castles, and galley-slaves into oppressed gentlemen, finds abundance, wherever he goes; while the esquire translates them all into the plain prose of truth with an admirable simplicity, quite unconscious of its own humor, and rendered the more striking by its contrast with the lofty and courteous dignity and magnificent illusions of the superior personage. There could, of course, be but one consistent termination of adventures like these. The knight and his esquire suffer a series of ridiculous discomfitures, and are at last brought home, like madmen, to their native village, where Cervantes leaves them, with an intimation that the story of their adventures is by no means ended.
From this time we hear little of Cervantes and nothing of his hero, till eight years afterwards, in July, 1613, when he wrote the Preface to his Tales, where he distinctly announces a Second Part of Don Quixote. But before this Second Part could be published, and, indeed, before it was finished, a person calling himself Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda, who seems, from some provincialisms in his style, to have been an Aragonese, and who, from other internal evidence, is suspected to have been a Dominican monk, came out, in the summer of 1614, with what he impertinently called “The Second Volume of the Ingenious Knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha.”[179]
Two things are remarkable in relation to this book. The first is, that, though it is hardly possible its author’s name should not have been known to many, and especially to Cervantes himself, still it is only by remote conjecture that it has been sometimes assigned to Luis de Aliaga, the king’s confessor, a person whom, from his influence at court, it might not have been deemed expedient openly to attack; and sometimes to Juan Blanco de Paz, a Dominican friar, who had been an enemy of Cervantes in Algiers. The second is, that the author seems to have had hints of the plan Cervantes was pursuing in his Second Part, then unfinished, and to have used them in an unworthy manner, especially in making Don Alvaro Tarfe play substantially the same part that is played by the Duke and Duchess towards Don Quixote, and in carrying the knight through an adventure at an inn with play-actors rehearsing one of Lope de Vega’s dramas, almost exactly like the adventure with the puppet-show man so admirably imagined by Cervantes.[180]
But this is all that can interest us about the book, which, if not without merit in some respects, is generally low and dull, and would now be forgotten, if it were not connected with the fame of Don Quixote. In its Preface, Cervantes is treated with coarse indignity, his age, his sufferings, and even his honorable wounds, being sneered at;[181] and in the body of the book, the character of Don Quixote, who appears as a vulgar madman, fancying himself to be Achilles, or any other character that happened to occur to the author,[182] is so completely without dignity or consistency, that it is clear the writer did not possess the power of comprehending the genius he at once basely libelled and meanly attempted to supplant. The best parts of the work are those in which Sancho is introduced; the worst are its indecent stories and the adventures of Barbara, who is a sort of brutal caricature of the graceful Dorothea, and whom the knight mistakes for Queen Zenobia.[183] But it is almost always wearisome, and comes to a poor conclusion by the confinement of Don Quixote in a mad-house.[184]
Cervantes evidently did not receive this affronting production until he was far advanced in the composition of his Second Part; but in the fifty-ninth chapter, written apparently when it first reached him, he breaks out upon it, and from that moment never ceases to persecute it, in every form of ingenious torture, until, in the seventy-fourth, he brings his own work to its conclusion. Even Sancho, with his accustomed humor and simplicity, is let loose upon the unhappy Aragonese; for, having understood from a chance traveller who first brings the book to their knowledge, that his wife is called in it Mary Gutierrez, instead of Teresa Panza,—
“‘A pretty sort of a history-writer,’ cried Sancho, ‘and a deal must he know of our affairs, if he calls Teresa Panza, my wife, Mary Gutierrez. Take the book again, Sir, and see if I am put into it, and if he has changed my name, too.’ ‘By what I hear you say, my friend,’ replied the stranger, ‘you are, no doubt, Sancho Panza, the esquire of Don Quixote.’ ‘To be sure I am,’ answered Sancho, ‘and proud of it, too.’ ‘Then, in truth,’ said the gentleman, ‘this new author does not treat you with the propriety shown in your own person; he makes you a glutton and a fool; not at all amusing, and quite another thing from the Sancho described in the first part of your master’s history.’ ‘Well, Heaven forgive him!’ said Sancho; ‘but I think he might have left me in my corner, without troubling himself about me; for, Let him play that knows the way; and, Saint Peter at Rome is well off at home.’”[185]
Stimulated by the appearance of this rival work, as well as offended with its personalities, Cervantes urged forward his own, and, if we may judge by its somewhat hurried air, brought it to a conclusion sooner than he had intended.[186] At any rate, as early as February, 1615, it was finished, and was published in the following autumn; after which we hear nothing more of Avellaneda, though he had intimated his purpose to exhibit Don Quixote in another series of adventures at Avila, Valladolid, and Salamanca.[187] This, indeed, Cervantes took some pains to prevent; for—besides a little changing his plan, and avoiding the jousts at Saragossa, because Avellaneda had carried his hero there[188]—he finally restores Don Quixote, through a severe illness, to his right mind, and makes him renounce all the follies of knight-errantry, and die, like a peaceful Christian, in his own bed;—thus cutting off the possibility of another continuation with the pretensions of the first.
This latter half of Don Quixote is a contradiction of the proverb Cervantes cites in it,—that second parts were never yet good for much. It is, in fact, better than the first. It shows more freedom and vigor; and if the caricature is sometimes pushed to the very verge of what is permitted, the invention, the style of thought, and, indeed, the materials throughout, are richer, and the finish is more exact. The character of Samson Carrasco, for instance,[189] is a very happy, though somewhat bold, addition to the original persons of the drama; and the adventures at the castle of the Duke and Duchess, where Don Quixote is fooled to the top of his bent; the managements of Sancho as governor of his island; the visions and dreams of the cave of Montesinos; the scenes with Roque Guinart, the freebooter, and with Gines de Passamonte, the galley-slave and puppet-show man; together with the mock-heroic hospitalities of Don Antonio Moreno at Barcelona, and the final defeat of the knight there, are all admirable. In truth, every thing in this Second Part, especially its general outline and tone, show that time and a degree of success he had not before known had ripened and perfected the strong manly sense and sure insight into human nature which are visible everywhere in the works of Cervantes, and which here become a part, as it were, of his peculiar genius, whose foundations had been laid, dark and deep, amidst the trials and sufferings of his various life.
But throughout both parts, Cervantes shows the impulses and instincts of an original power with most distinctness in his development of the characters of Don Quixote and Sancho; characters in whose contrast and opposition is hidden the full spirit of his peculiar humor, and no small part of what is most characteristic of the entire fiction. They are his prominent personages. He delights, therefore, to have them as much as possible in the front of his scene. They grow visibly upon his favor as he advances, and the fondness of his liking for them makes him constantly produce them in lights and relations as little foreseen by himself as they are by his readers. The knight, who seems to have been originally intended for a parody of the Amadis, becomes gradually a detached, separate, and wholly independent personage, into whom is infused so much of a generous and elevated nature, such gentleness and delicacy, such a pure sense of honor, and such a warm love for whatever is noble and good, that we feel almost the same attachment to him that the barber and the curate did, and are almost as ready as his family was to mourn over his death.
The case of Sancho is again very similar, and perhaps in some respects stronger. At first, he is introduced as the opposite of Don Quixote, and used merely to bring out his master’s peculiarities in a more striking relief. It is not until we have gone through nearly half of the First Part that he utters one of those proverbs which form afterwards the staple of his conversation and humor; and it is not till the opening of the Second Part, and, indeed, not till he comes forth, in all his mingled shrewdness and credulity, as governor of Barataria, that his character is quite developed and completed to the full measure of its grotesque, yet congruous, proportions.
Cervantes, in truth, came, at last, to love these creations of his marvellous power, as if they were real, familiar personages, and to speak of them and treat them with an earnestness and interest that tend much to the illusion of his readers. Both Don Quixote and Sancho are thus brought before us, like such living realities, that, at this moment, the figures of the crazed, gaunt, dignified knight and of his round, selfish, and most amusing esquire dwell bodied forth in the imaginations of more, among all conditions of men throughout Christendom, than any other of the creations of human talent. The greatest of the great poets—Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, Milton—have no doubt risen to loftier heights, and placed themselves in more imposing relations with the noblest attributes of our nature; but Cervantes—always writing under the unchecked impulse of his own genius, and instinctively concentrating in his fiction whatever was peculiar to the character of his nation—has shown himself of kindred to all times and all lands; to the humblest degrees of cultivation as well as to the highest; and has thus, beyond all other writers, received in return a tribute of sympathy and admiration from the universal spirit of humanity.
It is not easy to believe, that, when he had finished such a work, he was insensible to what he had done. Indeed, there are passages in the Don Quixote itself which prove a consciousness of his own genius, its aspirations, and its power.[190] And yet there are, on the other hand, carelessnesses, blemishes, and contradictions scattered through it, which seem to show him to have been almost indifferent to contemporary success or posthumous fame. His plan, which he seems to have modified more than once while engaged in the composition of the work, is loose and disjointed; his style, though full of the richest idiomatic beauties, abounds with inaccuracies; and the facts and incidents that make up his fiction are full of anachronisms, which Los Rios, Pellicer, and Eximeno have in vain endeavoured to reconcile, either with the main current of the story itself, or with one another.[191] Thus, in the First Part, Don Quixote is generally represented as belonging to a remote age, and his history is supposed to have been written by an ancient Arabian author;[192] while, in the examination of his library, he is plainly contemporary with Cervantes himself, and, after his defeats, is brought home confessedly in the year 1604. To add further to this confusion, when we reach the Second Part, which opens only a month after the conclusion of the First, and continues only a few weeks, we have, at the side of the same claims of an ancient Arabian author, a conversation about the expulsion of the Moors,[193] which happened after 1609, and a criticism on Avellaneda, whose work was published in 1614.[194]
But this is not all. As if still further to accumulate contradictions and incongruities, the very details of the story he has invented are often in whimsical conflict with each other, as well as with the historical facts to which they allude. Thus, on one occasion, the scenes which he had represented as having occurred in the course of a single evening and the following morning are said to have occupied two days;[195] on another, he sets a company down to a late supper, and, after conversations and stories that must have carried them nearly through the night, he says, “It began to draw towards evening.”[196] In different places he calls the same individual by different names, and—what is rather amusing—once reproaches Avellaneda with a mistake which was, after all, his own.[197] And finally, having discovered the inconsequence of saying seven times that Sancho was on his mule after Gines de Passamonte had stolen it, he took pains, in the only edition of the First Part that he ever revised, to correct two of his blunders,—heedlessly overlooking the rest; and when he published the Second Part, laughed heartily at the whole,—the errors, the corrections, and all,—as things of little consequence to himself or any body else.[198]
The romance, however, which he threw so carelessly from him, and which, I am persuaded, he regarded rather as a bold effort to break up the absurd taste of his time for the fancies of chivalry than as any thing of more serious import, has been established by an uninterrupted, and, it may be said, an unquestioned, success ever since, both as the oldest classical specimen of romantic fiction, and as one of the most remarkable monuments of modern genius. But though this may be enough to fill the measure of human fame and glory, it is not all to which Cervantes is entitled; for, if we would do him the justice that would have been dearest to his own spirit, and even if we would ourselves fully comprehend and enjoy the whole of his Don Quixote, we should, as we read it, bear in mind, that this delightful romance was not the result of a youthful exuberance of feeling and a happy external condition, nor composed in his best years, when the spirits of its author were light and his hopes high; but that—with all its unquenchable and irresistible humor, with its bright views of the world, and its cheerful trust in goodness and virtue—it was written in his old age, at the conclusion of a life nearly every step of which had been marked with disappointed expectations, disheartening struggles, and sore calamities; that he began it in a prison, and that it was finished when he felt the hand of death pressing heavy and cold upon his heart. If this be remembered as we read, we may feel, as we ought to feel, what admiration and reverence are due, not only to the living power of Don Quixote, but to the character and genius of Cervantes;—if it be forgotten or underrated, we shall fail in regard to both.[199]