And he sees across a weary land a winding road in Spain
Up which a lean and foolish knight rides slowly up in vain.
And it will be a sad world indeed when Don Quixote at last reaches the top of that winding road and men cease to love him.
At Lepanto Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (please pronounce the “a’s” separately) was about twenty-five years of age, and was lying below deck sick of a fever. When he heard the roar of the guns of Don John he sprang from his bed and rushed on deck in spite of the orders of his captain; he was put in charge of a boat’s crew of twelve men and went through the thick of the fighting. Every man in Don John’s fleet was fired with his religious enthusiasm, and Cervantes’ courage was only an index of the wild fervour that distinguished the Christians on that most bloody day. He was wounded in the left hand, “for the greater glory of the right,” as he himself quaintly says, and never again could he move the fingers of the injured hand; no doubt the tendon sheaths had become septic, and he was lucky to have kept the hand at all. It has been sapiently remarked that the world would have had a great loss if it had been the right hand; but healthy people who lose the right hand can easily learn to write with the left. Cervantes remained in the fleet for some years until, on his way home, he was captured by Algerian pirates; put to the service of a Christian renegade—a man who had turned Mussulman to save his life or from still less worthy motive—Cervantes made several attempts to escape, but these were unsuccessful, and he remained in captivity for some years until his family had scraped up enough to ransom him. In Don Quixote there is a good deal about the renegadoes, and much of the well-known story of the “escaped Moor” is probably autobiographical; from these hints we gather that the renegadoes were not quite so bad as has been generally thought, or else that Cervantes was far too big-minded a man to believe unnecessary evil about anybody.
Back in Spain, he went into the army for two years, until, in 1582, he gave up soldiering and took to literature. He found the pen “a good stick but a bad crutch,” and in 1585 returned to the public service as deputy-purveyor of the fleet. In 1594 he became collectors of revenues in Granada, and in 1597 he became short in his accounts and fell into jail. There he seems to have begun Don Quixote; he somehow obtained security for the repayment of the missing money, was released penniless into a suspicious world, and published the first part of Don Quixote in 1605. It was enormously well received, and from that day to this has remained one of the most successful of all books. Ten years later he found that dishonest publishers were issuing spurious second parts, so he sat himself down to write a genuine sequel. This differs from most sequels in that it is better than the original; it is wiser, mellower, less ironical; Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are still more lovable than they were before, and one imagines that Cervantes must have spent the whole ten years in collecting—or inventing—the wonderful proverbs so wisely uttered by the squire.
Though Cervantes wrote many plays he is now remembered mainly by his one very great romance, which is read lovingly in every language of every part of the world, so that the epithet “Quixotic” is applied everywhere to whatsoever is both gallant and foolish; an epithet which reflects the mixture of affection and pity in which the old Don is universally held, and is more often considered to be a compliment than the reverse. Curiously enough, women seldom seem to like Don Quixote; only the other day a brilliant young woman graduate told me that she thought he was a “silly old fool!” That was all she could see in him; but he is universally now thought to represent the pathos of the man who is born out of his time. As has been so well said, “This book is not meant for laughter—it is meant for tears.” I can do no more than advise everybody to get a thin-paper copy and let it live in the pocket for some months, reading it at odd moments; it is the wisest and wittiest book ever published. “Blessed be the man who invented sleep,” is a typical piece of Panzan philosophy with which most wise men will agree.
But when we have done sentimentalizing over the hidden meaning that undoubtedly underlies Don Quixote, we must not forget that it is extraordinarily funny even to a modern mind. The law that the humour of one generation is merely grotesque to the next does not seem to apply to Don Quixote; and I dare swear that the picture of the mad old Don, brought home from the inn of Maritornes, looking so stately in a cage upon a bullock-wagon, guarded by troopers of the Holy Brotherhood, and escorted by the priest and the barber, with the distracted Sancho Panza buzzing about wondering what has become of his promised Governorship, is absolutely the funniest thing in all literature; all the funnier because the springs of our laughter flow from the fount of our tears.
Now I cannot help thinking that when Cervantes began to write Don Quixote in prison, feeling bitter and sore against a world which had imprisoned him, and stiffened his hand for him, and condemned him to poverty and imprisonment, he must have had in his mind the story of the young bastard of Imperial Majesty who had risen to such heights of glory over Lepanto. It is not contended that Don Quixote was consciously intended to be a characterizature of Don Quixada or Don John, though his real name was Alonzo Quixana or Quixada, Don Quixote being a nom de guerre born of his frenzy; but I find it hard to believe that Cervantes had not heard of the foolish loyalty of Quixada in the matter of Jeronimo, or of the romantic dreams of Don John. It would seem that in these two incidents we find the true seeds of Don Quixote. It is not true that “Cervantes laughed Spain’s chivalry away.” Chivalry, meaning the social order of the true crusades, had long been dead even in Spain, the most conservative of nations. What really laughed Spain’s chivalry away was the gay and joyous laugh of Don John himself, who would have plunged her into a great war for a dream. The man who seriously thought of dashing across the North Sea to marry Mary Queen of Scots would have been quite capable of tilting at windmills. In his inmost heart Cervantes must have seen his folly.
The death of Don Quixote is probably the most generally famous in literature, vying with that of Colonel Newcome, though more impressive because it is less sentimental. Cervantes had begun by rather jeering at his old Don, and subjecting him to uncalled-for cudgellings and humiliations; he then fell in love with the brave old lunatic, as everybody else has fallen in love with him ever since, and by the time that he came to die had drawn him as a really noble and beautiful character, who shows all the pathos of the idealist who is born out of his time. The death of Don Quixote is, except the death of one other Idealist, the most affecting death in all literature; the pathos is secured by means similarly restrained. The Bachelor Samson Carrasco, in his determination to cure Don Quixote of his knight-errant folly, had dressed himself up as “The Knight of the White Moon,” and vowed that there was another lady more fair than Dulcinea del Toboso. At that blasphemy Don Quixote naturally flew to arms and challenged the insolent knight. By that time Rosinante was but old bones, so the Bachelor, being well-mounted on a young charger, overthrew the old horse and his brave old rider, and Don Quixote came to grass with a terrible fall. Then the Bachelor made Don Quixote vow that he would cease from his knight-errantry for a whole year, by which time it was hoped that he would be cured. They lifted his visor and found the old man “pale and sweating”; evidently Cervantes had seen some old man suffering from shock, and described what he saw in three words. From this humiliation Don Quixote never really recovered. He reached home and formed the mad idea of turning shepherd with Sancho and the Bachelor, and living out his penance in the fields. But Death saw otherwise, and the old man answered his call before he could do as he wished. He was seized with a violent fever that confined him to his room for six days; finally he slept calmly for some hours, and again awakened, only to fall into one attack of syncope after another until he died; the sanguine assurance of Sancho Panza that Dulcinea had been successfully disenchanted could not save him. Like most idealists he died a sad and disappointed man, certain of one thing only—that he was out of touch with the majority of mankind.
Cervantes was far too great an artist to kill his old hero by some such folly as “brain fever”—which nonsense I guess to have been typhoid. I believe that in describing the death of Don Quixote he was thinking of some old man whom he had seen crawl home to die after a severe physical shock, disappointed and disillusioned in a world of practical youth in which there is no room for romantic old age—probably some kind old man whom he himself had loved. These old men usually die of hypostatic pneumonia, which has been called the “natural end of man,” and is probably the real broken heart of popular medicine. The old man, after a severe shock, is affected by a weakened circulation; the lungs are attacked by a slow inflammation, and he dies, usually in a few days, in much the same way as died Don Quixote. Cervantes did not know that these old men die from inflammation of the lungs; no doubt he observed the way they die, and immortalized his memories in the death of Don Quixote. I have written this to point out Cervantes’ great powers of observation. He would probably have made a good doctor in our day.