Cervantes was one of the men who write books in two languages; in literature and in life. Indeed, his contribution to his country's history is scarcely less vivid than his share in the history of story-telling. Cervantes the soldier, losing the use of his hand in the naval battle of Lepanto, in which he took so glorious a part that the grandiloquent Spanish tradition attributed to him, a mere private soldier, more than half the merit of the victory, is quite as attractive as Cervantes the impecunious author, writing plays for the theatre and poems for the nobility, collecting taxes for the king, pleasing himself with his Galatea, and laying literature under an international debt to him for his Exemplary Novels and his Don Quixote. Like Sir Philip Sidney, he won admiration from his contemporaries as much for his personal worth as for his intellect. The maimed hand meant to them and him as much as any printed books. His own life was as romantic as his romance. Wherever he had found himself, boarding a Turkish galley, plotting for freedom in the prisons of Algiers, he had played the game as stirringly as d'Artagnan. Don Quixote's patriotism was no more obstinate and glamorous than his, and Sancho Panza's wisdom was gained in no school of harder knocks.
It is not without significance that his first book should be a specimen of pastoral romance. The Galatea bears no closer relation to workaday life than Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. This old soldier began his career as a man of letters by trying to settle upon an estate in Arcady, the very country whose cardboard foliage he was afterwards to ridicule, and the last book he wrote, in spite of the humaner work that had preceded it, was a romance not dissimilar from his first. Partly this must have been due to the fashion of the time; but it is not extravagant to find in it an illustration of the wistful manner in which men write about their opposites. Men like Stevenson, caged in sick rooms, may love to be buccaneers on paper. The real adventurers set the balance even by imagining themselves tending sheep on a smooth grassy slope.
Don Quixote no parody.
Cervantes' Galatea is not a great work. Its shepherds weep more than Sir Philip Sidney's, and sing considerably worse. But it had its success, and Cervantes was never anything but proud of it, a fact that should not be forgotten in remembering his Don Quixote. Don Quixote has often been described as a parody of the heroic and pastoral romances, which indeed had become a little foolish. But Cervantes was not the man to jeer at what he loved. Instead, he fills the old skins that had held the wine of dreams with the new wine of experience. He did not parody the old romances, but re-wrote them in a different way. Parody laughs and writes a full stop; the art of Cervantes, Fielding, and Rabelais ends always in a hyphen, a sign that allows all manner of developments.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA
The picaresque form.
Cervantes, like Shakespeare, used all the resources of his time, and did not disdain to profit by other men's experiments. Don Quixote owed a triple debt to the common-sensible humorous rogue novel invented seventy years before, as well as to the more serious tales of knights and pastoral life that made his existence possible. Thieves and shepherds and paragons of chivalry assisted at his birth. The thieves in particular were responsible for the design, or lack of design, in the construction of the book. The rogue novels were made by stringing a series of disconnected 'merry quips' along the autobiography or biography of a disreputable hero. They were like Punch and Judy shows. The character of Punch is as stable as his red nose or his hump back. His deeds do not change him, and, so long as he is always well in the front of his stage we ask for no other connecting thread in the entertainment than his habit of punctuating his conversation with a well-directed log of wood. Let him continue his villainous career, let his squeaking inhuman voice continue to exult, and we are perfectly contented. It was so with the rogues, and it is so with Don Quixote. As the Bachelor says, 'many of those that love mirth better than melancholy, cry out, give us more Quixoteries: let but Don Quixote lay on, and Sancho talk, be it what it will, we are satisfied.'
Rogue novel and romance.