That the name of Miguel de Cervantes towers above all others in Spanish literature is a commonplace. Montesquieu’s jest, that Spain has produced but one good book, which was written to prove the absurdity of all the others, is only the flippant statement of the truth that the one Spanish book which the world has taken to itself is Don Quixote. What else the Spaniards have done in literature may have its own beauty and interest. It may even have affected the literature of other nations. The Spanish drama did something to form the purely theatrical skill of the playwright, and the Novela de Pícaros gave a framework for the prose story of common life. Yet the plays of Lope or of Calderon, the tales of Aleman, Espinel, and others, are essentially Spanish, and Spanish of one time. It is only in touches here and there that we find in them, behind their native vesture, any touch of what is human and universal. Even when they dealt with what was common to them with other peoples, the emotions of piety and devotion, they gave them their own colour, their own purely Spanish flavour. There is no Imitation of Christ, no Pilgrim’s Progress, in their religious writing. But Don Quixote is so little purely Spanish that its influence has been mainly felt abroad, that it has been, and is, loved by many who have neither heard nor wish to hear of the literature lying round it.
His life.
The life of Cervantes has been made so familiar that the details need only be briefly mentioned here.[45] It is within the knowledge of all who take any interest in him at all that he was by descent a gentleman of an ancient house. His own branch of it had become poor. He was born, probably on some day in October 1547, at Alcalá de Henares, a town lying to the east of Madrid, and the seat of the university founded by Cardinal Jimenez. It does not appear that Cervantes ever attended the university, or received more than the trifling schooling which fell to the lot of Shakespeare also. Mar, Iglesia, y casa de rey—the sea (i.e., adventure in America), the Church, and the king’s service—were the three careers open to a gentleman at a time when trade, medicine, and even the law, were plebeian. Cervantes began life in the household of a great Italian ecclesiastic, Cardinal Acquaviva, in one of those positions of domestic service about men of high position which were then, in all countries, filled by gentlemen of small or no fortune. From 1571 to 1575 he served as a soldier under Don John of Austria, and received that wound in the left hand at the battle of Lepanto in which he took a noble pride. From 1575 to 1580 he was a prisoner in Algiers. After his release in 1580 till his death in 1616—for thirty-six long years full of misfortune—he led the struggling life of a Spanish gentleman who had no fortune, no interest, no command of the arts which ingratiate a dependent with a superior. At the very end he may have enjoyed some measure of comparative ease, but few men of letters have been poorer. Most men of his class were no richer than himself,—for Spain was a very poor country, and mere poverty was deprived of its worst sting when men ranked by birth and not by their possessions. No want of means could cause a noble to be other than the social superior of the merely rich man, while the Church had been only too successful in investing poverty with a certain sanctity. Yet though there were alleviations, the lot of Cervantes was a hard one, embittered by disappointments and imprisonments, which seem to have been chiefly due to the clumsy brutality of the Spanish judicial system. All this he bore with that dignity in misfortune which is one of the finest features in the character of the Spaniard, and with a cheerful courage all his own. Everything known of his life shows that he possessed two of the finest qualities which can support a man in a life of hardship—pride and a sweet temper.
His work.
The written work of Cervantes is divided in a way not unexampled in literature, but nowhere seen to the same extent except in the case of Prevost, a far smaller, but a real, genius. If he had left nothing but Don Quixote, his place in literature would be what it is. If he had not written his one masterpiece, he would have passed unnoticed; and there would have been no reason why he should have been remembered, unless it were with Bermudez and Virues, as one of the forerunners of Lope who made vague, ill-directed experiments in the childhood of Spanish dramatic literature. Even the Novelas Ejemplares, though they possess a greater measure of his qualities than any part of his literary inheritance, other than Don Quixote and his entremeses, are mainly interesting because they are his. Other Spaniards did such things as well as he, or better, but none have approached Don Quixote. The difference is not in degree, it is in kind.
The minor things.
We may, then, pass rapidly over the minor things. It is to be noted that his natural inclination was not towards letters, but to arms. When a mere boy he did, indeed, write some verses on the death of Isabelle of Valois, the wife of Philip II., but they were school exercises written at the instigation of his master, Juan Lopez de Hoyos, and published by him. Like Sir Walter Scott, he believed in the greater nobility of the life of action, and more particularly in the superiority of the “noble profession of arms.” If he could have had his choice it would have been to serve the king, and more especially to serve him in the reconquest of Northern Africa from the Mahometans. He was driven to write by mere necessity, and the want of what he would fain have had. During his captivity in Algiers he made plays for the amusement of his fellow-prisoners. After his release, when he was again employed as a soldier in the conquest of Portugal, in 1580 he wrote his unfinished pastoral, the Galatea. He was married in 1584, and established in Madrid. At this period he wrote many plays, now lost, and two which have survived. The Trato de Argel, or ‘Life in Algiers,’ has some biographical interest, and some general value as a picture of the pirate stronghold, but is valuable on these grounds only. The Numancia belongs to the class of works describable in the good sense as curious. It is a long dialogued poem divided into scenes and acts, on the siege of Numantia by Scipio, and is not without a certain grandiose force. As a play it shows that the Spanish drama had not found its way, and that Cervantes was not to be its guide. It struggles between imitation of the mystery, vague efforts to follow an ill-understood classic model, and attempt to strike a new and native path which the author could nowhere find. Then comes a long interval, during which Lope was sweeping all rivals from the stage, and Cervantes, in his own phrase, was buried “in the silence of oblivion.” He was struggling for mere subsistence, working as a clerk under the Commissary of the Indian fleet, collecting rents for the Knights of St John, and finally, as it would seem, supporting himself, his wife, a natural daughter born to him in Portugal before his marriage, and a sister, by the trade of escribiente at Valladolid. The escribiente, still a recognised workman in Spain, writes letters for those who cannot write for themselves.
He never quite lost his connection with literature. A few commendatory verses in the books of friends, and other slight traces, remain to show that in the intervals of the work by which he lived he endeavoured to keep a place among the poets and dramatists of the time. During these years he wrote the first part of Don Quixote. It appeared in 1605, but, according to the usual practice, had been shown to friends in manuscript. His last years were spent in Madrid. How he lived must remain a mystery. The Don Quixote was popular, but copyrights were then not lucrative, even if they could be said to exist. He again tried the stage, and was again unsuccessful. In 1613 he published the Novelas Ejemplares, a collection of short stories, partly on the picaresque, partly on an Italian, model. During the following year he brought out the Voyage to Parnassus, a verse review of the poets of his time, a common form of literary exercise, and not a good specimen of its kind. In 1614 he was provoked by the false second part of Don Quixote. This was a form of literary meanness from which Mateo Aleman had already suffered, but Cervantes had particular cause to be angry. The continuer of Guzman de Alfarache appears to have been only an impudent plagiarist, but the writer who continued Don Quixote was obviously animated by personal hostility. He descended to a grovelling sneer at Cervantes’ wounded hand. It has been guessed that this is another chapter in the miserable history of the quarrels of authors. Avellaneda, as the author of the false second part called himself, is supposed to have acted on the instigation of Lope de Vega, who is known to have had no friendly feelings for Cervantes. The trick, which was as clumsy as it was spiteful, probably hastened the appearance of the genuine second part. It undoubtedly had some influence on the form, for it induced Cervantes to alter the course of the story, in order to make the two as unlike as possible. Perhaps it decided the author to kill the hero lest another should murder him. The second part was printed in 1615. Cervantes died in the next year. Cheerful and hopeful to the end, even when “his foot was in stirrup” for the last journey, he had prepared his Persiles y Sigismunda for the press before he died. This was meant to be a model of what a tale of adventure might be, and was written with more care in the formal and mechanical parts than he gave to Don Quixote; but, like almost all he is known to have done with deliberate literary intentions, it is dull and lifeless.
Don Quixote.
There is a difficulty in speaking of Don Quixote. One has to come after Fielding and Scott, Heine, Thackeray, and Sainte-Beuve, not to mention many others hardly less illustrious. These are great names, and it may seem that after they have spoken there is nothing left to say. The first duty which this position imposes is not to endeavour deliberately to be different, in the vain hope of attaining originality. But the cloud of witnesses who might be summoned to prove the enduring interest of Don Quixote is itself a part of the critical history of the book, and a tribute to its solitary place in Spanish literature. The ascetic and so-called mystic writers had their day of influence among us in the seventeenth century. Crashaw alone is enough to prove that here, and in a certain section of English life and literature, Santa Teresa and Juan de la Cruz were living forces. Quevedo had his day, and the Novela de Pícaros their following. During the romantic movement, the dramatists were much in men’s mouths. But in each case the Spaniard remained only for a time. Calderon once had his place in Lord Tennyson’s Palace of Art, but he fell out, and that has been the fate of all things Spanish in literature. They have given an indication, have been used—and forgotten, or they have been welcomed as strange, mysterious, probably beautiful, and then silently dropped as too exclusively Spanish, too entirely belonging to a long past century. But Don Quixote has been always with us since Shelton’s translation of the first part appeared in 1612. This of itself is proof enough that there is something in Don Quixote which is absent from other Spanish work, whether his own or that of other men.