The Life of Cervantes

by Albert Frederick Calvert

I have quoted thus freely because the passage illustrates better than pages of comment, the high ideals that inspired Cervantes both in the tented field and in the long solitude of his poor study. He fought as he wrote like a Christian gentleman; and if, in his lifetime, arms did not bring him honours, nor letters riches, posterity is agreed to recognise in him one of the truest soldiers and greatest writers of all times. It was his persistent evil chance which, when he had abandoned the perilous calling of a warrior, should dog his steps with sufferings from which the writer is usually exempt. In June, 1605 within a month or two of the publication of Don Quixote, a court gallant, Don Gaspar de Ezpeleta, was suddenly assailed by two men, wounded and left for dead in the street before Cervantes’ house. The author and his family hearing his cries carried the stricken man into their lodging, where he died in a few hours. Justice, in taking up the affair, clapped

DON QUIXOTE AND SANCHO PANZA.

(OLDEST PLATE.)

Paris, 1622.

First Edition.

Cervantes and his family in gaol, where they were detained until the result of the inquiry exonerated them from playing anything but the Samaritan’s part in the matter. This too, as Edmondo de Amicis reflects, had to fall to the lot of the poor author of Don Quixote, so that he could be said to have experienced every kind of trial.

“We crossed the Mancha,” writes de Amicis in another reference to Cervantes in his work on Spain, “the celebrated Mancha, the immortal theatre of the adventures of Don Quixote. It is just as I imagined it. There are broad, bare plains, long tracts of sandy earth, some windmills, a few miserable villages, solitary paths, and wretched, abandoned houses. On seeing those places I experienced a feeling of melancholy which the perusal of Cervantes’ book always rouses; and I repeated to myself what I always say in reading it: ‘This man cannot make one laugh; or, if he does, under the smile, the tears are springing up.’ Don Quixote is a sad and solemn character; his mania is a lament; his life is the history of the dreams, illusions, disappointments and aberrations of us all; the struggle of reason with the imagination, of the true with the false, the ideal with the real! We all have something of Don Quixote about us; we all take windmills for giants; all are spurred upward from time to time by an impulse of enthusiasm, and driven back by a laugh of disdain; are all a mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous, and feel, with profound bitterness, the perpetual contrast between the greatness of our aspirations and the weakness of our powers.”

One reads the opinion of the eminent Italian author, and it but confirms the opinion that Mr. Watts is doubtless right in his belief that Don Quixote and the man of Lepanto are one and the same.