Germond de Lavigne, with a sophistry, inspired, we may suppose, by admiration of Vega, declared that we owe a debt to Avellaneda, seeing that but for him Don Quixote would have remained a mere torso, instead of a complete work. Such a piece of special pleading is, of course, fallacious, since Cervantes had pledged himself to produce a second part, and the book must have been nearing completion, in 1614, when Avellaneda’s travesty was published. It is evident that he had progressed as far as the nineteenth chapter, and was within ten chapters of the end, when the Tarragonese bastard was put into circulation, and Cervantes, changing his published plan of procedure, turns Don Quixote from his purpose of entering the lists at Zaragoza and hurries him off to Barcelona. With this counterfeit upon the market Cervantes could no longer pursue the leisurely tenor of his way, and the injury he had received spurred him to new flights of pungent humour. But although our author in this Second Part of Don Quixote deals with his enemy with dignified restraint, and introduces him in person to drub him with the jester’s bladder, rather than becudgel him with his own club, we descry in the dedication of his last book of comedies (1615) how keenly he felt the smart.
Avellaneda had charged him with disparaging the innumerable “stupendous comedies” of Lope de Vega, and of persecuting the Inquisition. Cervantes straightly denies both these imputations, declaring that he “adores Vega’s genius, and admires his works continuous and virtuous,” and protests that he is not likely to persecute any ecclesiastic—above all, if he is a familiar of the Holy Office to boot. “But,” he writes in this dedication to the Conde de Lemos, “that which I cannot help feeling is that he charges me with being old and maimed, as though it had been in my power to stop time from passing over me, or as though my deformity had been produced in some tavern, and not on the grandest occasion which ages past and present have seen, or those to come can hope to see. If my wounds do not shine in the eyes of him who looks on them, they are at least honoured in the estimation of those who know where they were acquired; for the soldier looks better dead in battle than alive in flight. And so much I am of this opinion that if now I could devise and bring about the impossible, I would rather be present again in that wonderful action than now be whole of my wounds, without having taken part therein.”
With this manly and characteristic protest we may, I think, close the volume of this scandal, and press forward to the near close of Cervantes’ career.
SANCHO’S DILIGENCE IN ENCHANTING DULCINEA.
London, 1858.
47th Edition.
In this same dedication there is the intimation that Don Quixote is “waiting in the Second Part, booted and spurred, to do homage” to the Conde de Lemos, and before the end of the year (1615) the completion of the great work was published. The book was printed by Juan de la Cuesta, who had printed the First Part, and Francisco de Robles was again associated with Cervantes as publisher. The public received the new volume with the same enthusiasm that they had extended to its predecessor, and although posthumous criticism has in some instances refused to regard it as equal in merit to the first instalment—Charles Lamb went out of his way to refer to it as “that unfortunate Second Part”—the general reading public of successive generations have agreed in regarding it as the most diverting half of the novel. Cervantes himself has declared, through the mouth of the scholar, Samson Carrasco, that second parts are never good, but this rule found a striking exception in the case of his own work. With increasing years the author betrayed no sign of flagging vivacity; experience had lent him a surer hand in the development of character; and while the Knight of La Mancha’s adventures take on a less fantastic guise, and his reflections increase in wisdom, the wit of Sancho Panza broadens and ripens, and the humanity of the immortal comrades acquires a deeper note. Lamb wrote of “that unworthy Duke,” and he condemned the Duchess as “most comtemptible.” Many readers of Cervantes must at times have rebelled against the ingenuity with which the Don’s ducal entertainers conspired to make sport of their guest, and have deplored the means they employed in accomplishing their purpose. But if Cervantes had not had resource to these exalted conspirators we should have lost the passages between Sancho and the Duchess, the story of the squire’s government, and the course prescribed for the disenchantment of Dulcinea del Tobosco—surely among the most richly humorous chapters in the whole story!—and, finally, the death-bed scene, with the old knight-errant, disillusioned, but resigned, dictating his will with his weeping friends around him, and his faithful squire beseeching him “not to die this time, but even take my counsel, and live on many years,” since “the maddest thing ever a man can do is to die!”
Yet in the face of facts there are critics who would argue that the Second Part was inferior to the First, both as a work of art and as a commercial venture. It is certainly incorrect to say, as one writer does, that “when the second part of Don Quixote came before the world it was universally felt that in nearly every respect it betrayed a great falling off.” Nor can the following criticism, taken from the same source, be accepted: “The fire of imagination, which had sustained him throughout the earlier cycle of adventures, now began to burn low; there was less wit in the speeches, less vivacity in the conversation, less humour and pathos in the situations and incidents. He perceived that he had a great