To work when you need not work, to prevent your time being wasted in pleasure and amusements and your efforts being relaxed by comforts and luxuries, is perhaps even more difficult than the struggle against necessity and poverty. Only a few great men brought up in such circumstances have succeeded. Tycho Brahe was one of them, and it is very greatly to his credit that by strength of will and character he overcame to the extent he did these formidable obstacles.
A. P.
IV
CERVANTES
1547–1616
Leisure, an agreeable residence, pleasant fields, serene skies, murmuring streams, and tranquillity of mind—by these the most barren muse may become fruitful and produce that which will delight and astonish the world.
It is not often that great men are recognized in their lifetime. They may have a few admirers, but their work is probably the subject of dispute and disagreement, and not till years have passed, and the smaller men who attracted momentary attention have been forgotten, are they valued at last at their true worth. Thus it may happen that men who are talked about a great deal, and rather noisily praised by their contemporaries, disappear almost entirely from the memory of man in succeeding generations, while men who in their day have despaired of success, have been neglected, and have sometimes felt the humiliation of failure, live on in their work long after their death and exercise an influence more far-reaching than they themselves ever dreamed of.
Of course you have heard of Don Quixote, and you have probably read some of his amusing adventures—how he went about with his funny little squire, Sancho Panza, and gave proof of his heroism in many diverting ways. But the book in which his adventures are written is not only an entertaining story—it is a wonderfully accurate picture of Spanish life in the sixteenth century, and is a record of many interesting events that took place outside Spain as well. When it was published in 1605, the book was very popular in Spain, but nobody thought it was going to become one of the world’s greatest books, no one guessed that it would be translated into more foreign languages than any other book in the world except the Bible and Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress.” No one, therefore, paid much attention to the author, and his very birthplace was not even remembered after he died. But when the Spaniards found that Cervantes had become famous throughout the world, then they took the trouble to unearth something about his history, and it was found that he had a claim to fame as a man, apart from his renown as an author.
Cervantes was a soldier. It is not usual for a soldier to write imaginative books. But he was not a soldier in a regular army, drilling every day in a barrack square, but a soldier who went out and fought, endured fearful hardships, and had the most terrible adventures. He gained in this way a very wide knowledge of the world, which, combined with his powerful imagination, made him into one of the world’s great geniuses.
