WHAT PASSED BETWEEN DON QUIXOTE AND HIS SQUIRE.
Madrid, 1868.
58th Edition.
Cervantes survived the publication of Don Quixote some six months—long enough to see the false Second Part routed and extinguished by his own all-conquering creation. Inspired to renewed activity by the chorus of praise which greeted his latest production, we find him, in his 69th year, arranging his plans for the output of three more works—The Weeks of the Garden, the second part of the Galatea, and the Travels of Persiles and Sigismunda, which latter was to be “either the worst or the best of books of entertainment in our language.” The sequel to the Galatea and the projected Weeks of the Garden were probably never commenced, although he refers to them both again in the prologue to Persiles, which was written on his death-bed, and published by his widow in 1617.
Although Persiles and Sigismunda has been extravagantly praised by Valdivielso—“Of the many books written by Cervantes,” he says, “none is more ingenious, more cultured, or more entertaining”—and although it has gone into more editions than any of the minor works of its author, this return to the monstrous artificial style which he had been the means of destroying, is a paradoxical and incomprehensible variant of his genius. In the last chapter of Don Quixote he had caused the Knight to aver: “I now declare myself an enemy to Amadis de Gaul, and his whole generation; all stories of knight-errantry I detest.” Yet within a few months of writing this passage he was engaged in completing a conglomeration of adventures, experienced by a pair of impossible lovers, under every kind of impossible condition. The Spanish critics admire the book for the beauty and correctness of the language, and the grace and charm of its style, but, as a work of creative art, it lacks invention and originality; and, as a piece of fiction—a “pastime for the melancholy and mopish soul”—it is tedious and ineffective.
But because it carries with it the biographically-conceived dedication to the Conde de Lemos, we are grateful to Cervantes for his last romance. In it we read of the return journey from the famous town of Esquívias—“famous for a thousand things, one for its illustrious families, and another for its most illustrious wines”—on which Cervantes tells us he was overtaken by the grey student on the little she-ass. His chance companion having addressed him as “the all famous, the merry writer, and, indeed, the joy of the muses,” they resumed their journey, in the course of which the infirmity of the merry writer was touched upon. “At which,” says Cervantes, “the good student checked my mirth in a moment: ‘This malady is the dropsy, which not all the water of ocean, let it be ever so sweet drinking, can cure. Let your worship, Señor Cervantes, set bounds to your drink, not forgetting to eat, for so without other medicine you will do well.’ ‘That many have told me,’ answered I, ‘but I can no more give up drinking for pleasure than if I had been born for nothing else. My life is slipping away, and, by the diary my
DON QUIXOTE AND SANCHO, ON THE ROAD TO TOBOSO.
Paris, 1868.