Cervantes' Masterpiece a Book for All Time—Intensely Spanish, it Still Appeals to All Nations by its Deep Human Interest.
Among the great books of the world no contrast could be greater than that between St. Augustine's Confessions and Don Quixote by Cervantes, yet each in its way has influenced unnumbered thousands and will continue to influence other thousands so long as this world shall endure. Few great books have been so widely quoted as this masterpiece of the great Spaniard; few have contributed so many apt stories and pungent epigrams. Of the great imaginary characters of fiction none is more strongly or clearly defined than the sad-faced Knight of La Mancha and his squire, Sancho Panza. The grammar school pupil in his reading finds constant allusions to Don Quixote and his adventures, and the world's greatest writers have drawn upon this romance by Cervantes for material to point their own remarks.
In this respect the only great author Spain has produced resembles Shakespeare. His appeal is universal because the man behind the romance had tasted to the bitter dregs all that life can offer, yet his nature had remained sweet and wholesome. Byron in Childe Harold, with his cunning trick of epigram, said that Cervantes "smiled Spain's chivalry away," but chivalry was as dead in the days of Cervantes as it is now. What the creator of Don Quixote did was to ridicule the high-flown talk, the absurd sentimentality that marked chivalry, while at the same time he brought out, as no one else has ever done, the splendid qualities that made chivalry immortal.
Don Quixote is a man who is absolutely out of touch with the world in which he moves, but while you laugh at his absurd misconceptions you feel for him the deepest respect; you would no more laugh at the man himself than you would at poor unfortunate Lear. The idealistic quality of Don Quixote himself is enhanced by the swinish nature of Sancho Panza, who cannot understand any of his master's raptures. Into this character of the sorrowful-faced knight Cervantes put all the results of his own hard experience. The old knight is often pessimistic, but it is a genial pessimism that makes one smile; while running through the whole book is a modern note that can be found in no other book written in the early days of the seventeenth century.
That Cervantes himself was unconscious that he had produced a book that would live for centuries after he was gone is the best proof of the genius of the writer. The plays and romances which he liked the best are now forgotten, as are most of the works of Lope de Vega, the popular literary idol of his day. The book is intensely Spanish, yet its appeal is limited to no race, no creed and no age.
Portrait of Cervantes
from an Old Steel Engraving in a
Rare French Edition of
"Don Quixote"
We have far more data in regard to the life of Cervantes than we have concerning Shakespeare, yet the Spanish author died on the same day. Cervantes came of noble family, but its fortune had vanished when he entered on life. He spent his boyhood in Valladolid and at twenty went up to Madrid, where he soon joined the train of the Papal Ambassador, Monsignor Acquaviva, and with him went to Rome, then the literary center of the world. There he learned Italian and absorbed culture as well as the prevailing enthusiasm for the crusades against the Turks, who were then menacing Venice and all the cities along the northern shore of the Mediterranean.