Nor does he himself permit us to give to his romance any such secret meaning; for, at the very beginning of the work, he announces it to be his sole purpose to break down the vogue and authority of books of chivalry, and, at the end of the whole, he declares anew, in his own person, that “he had had no other desire than to render abhorred of men the false and absurd stories contained in books of chivalry”;[169] exulting in his success, as an achievement of no small moment. And such, in fact, it was; for we have abundant proof that the fanaticism for these romances was so great in Spain, during the sixteenth century, as to have become matter of alarm to the more judicious. Many of the distinguished contemporary authors speak of its mischiefs, and among the rest the venerable Luis de Granada, and Malon de Chaide, who wrote the eloquent “Conversion of Mary Magdalen.”[170] Guevara, the learned and fortunate courtier of Charles the Fifth, declares that “men did read nothing in his time but such shameful books as ‘Amadis de Gaula,’ ‘Tristan,’ ‘Primaleon,’ and the like”;[171] the acute author of “The Dialogue on Languages” says that “the ten years he passed at court he wasted in studying ‘Florisando,’ ‘Lisuarte,’ ‘The Knight of the Cross,’ and other such books, more than he can name”;[172] and from different sources we know, what, indeed, we may gather from Cervantes himself, that many who read these fictions took them for true histories.[173] At last, they were deemed so noxious, that, in 1553, they were prohibited by law from being printed or sold in the American colonies, and in 1555 the same prohibition, and even the burning of all copies of them extant in Spain itself, was earnestly asked for by the Cortes.[174] The evil, in fact, had become formidable, and the wise began to see it.
To destroy a passion that had struck its roots so deeply in the character of all classes of men,[175] to break up the only reading which at that time could be considered widely popular and fashionable,[176] was certainly a bold undertaking, and one that marks any thing rather than a scornful or broken spirit, or a want of faith in what is most to be valued in our common nature. The great wonder is, that Cervantes succeeded. But that he did there is no question. No book of chivalry was written after the appearance of Don Quixote, in 1605; and from the same date, even those already enjoying the greatest favor ceased, with one or two unimportant exceptions, to be reprinted;[177] so that, from that time to the present, they have been constantly disappearing, until they are now among the rarest of literary curiosities;—a solitary instance of the power of genius to destroy, by a single well-timed blow, an entire department, and that, too, a flourishing and favored one, in the literature of a great and proud nation.
The general plan Cervantes adopted to accomplish this object, without, perhaps, foreseeing its whole course, and still less all its results, was simple as well as original. In 1605,[178] he published the First Part of Don Quixote, in which a country gentleman of La Mancha—full of genuine Castilian honor and enthusiasm, gentle and dignified in his character, trusted by his friends, and loved by his dependants—is represented as so completely crazed by long reading the most famous books of chivalry, that he believes them to be true, and feels himself called on to become the impossible knight-errant they describe,—nay, actually goes forth into the world to defend the oppressed and avenge the injured, like the heroes of his romances.
To complete his chivalrous equipment—which he had begun by fitting up for himself a suit of armour strange to his century—he took an esquire out of his neighbourhood; a middle-aged peasant, ignorant and credulous to excess, but of great good-nature; a glutton and a liar; selfish and gross, yet attached to his master; shrewd enough occasionally to see the folly of their position, but always amusing, and sometimes mischievous, in his interpretations of it. These two sally forth from their native village in search of adventures, of which the excited imagination of the knight, turning windmills into giants, solitary inns into castles, and galley-slaves into oppressed gentlemen, finds abundance, wherever he goes; while the esquire translates them all into the plain prose of truth with an admirable simplicity, quite unconscious of its own humor, and rendered the more striking by its contrast with the lofty and courteous dignity and magnificent illusions of the superior personage. There could, of course, be but one consistent termination of adventures like these. The knight and his esquire suffer a series of ridiculous discomfitures, and are at last brought home, like madmen, to their native village, where Cervantes leaves them, with an intimation that the story of their adventures is by no means ended.
From this time we hear little of Cervantes and nothing of his hero, till eight years afterwards, in July, 1613, when he wrote the Preface to his Tales, where he distinctly announces a Second Part of Don Quixote. But before this Second Part could be published, and, indeed, before it was finished, a person calling himself Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda, who seems, from some provincialisms in his style, to have been an Aragonese, and who, from other internal evidence, is suspected to have been a Dominican monk, came out, in the summer of 1614, with what he impertinently called “The Second Volume of the Ingenious Knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha.”[179]
Two things are remarkable in relation to this book. The first is, that, though it is hardly possible its author’s name should not have been known to many, and especially to Cervantes himself, still it is only by remote conjecture that it has been sometimes assigned to Luis de Aliaga, the king’s confessor, a person whom, from his influence at court, it might not have been deemed expedient openly to attack; and sometimes to Juan Blanco de Paz, a Dominican friar, who had been an enemy of Cervantes in Algiers. The second is, that the author seems to have had hints of the plan Cervantes was pursuing in his Second Part, then unfinished, and to have used them in an unworthy manner, especially in making Don Alvaro Tarfe play substantially the same part that is played by the Duke and Duchess towards Don Quixote, and in carrying the knight through an adventure at an inn with play-actors rehearsing one of Lope de Vega’s dramas, almost exactly like the adventure with the puppet-show man so admirably imagined by Cervantes.[180]
But this is all that can interest us about the book, which, if not without merit in some respects, is generally low and dull, and would now be forgotten, if it were not connected with the fame of Don Quixote. In its Preface, Cervantes is treated with coarse indignity, his age, his sufferings, and even his honorable wounds, being sneered at;[181] and in the body of the book, the character of Don Quixote, who appears as a vulgar madman, fancying himself to be Achilles, or any other character that happened to occur to the author,[182] is so completely without dignity or consistency, that it is clear the writer did not possess the power of comprehending the genius he at once basely libelled and meanly attempted to supplant. The best parts of the work are those in which Sancho is introduced; the worst are its indecent stories and the adventures of Barbara, who is a sort of brutal caricature of the graceful Dorothea, and whom the knight mistakes for Queen Zenobia.[183] But it is almost always wearisome, and comes to a poor conclusion by the confinement of Don Quixote in a mad-house.[184]
Cervantes evidently did not receive this affronting production until he was far advanced in the composition of his Second Part; but in the fifty-ninth chapter, written apparently when it first reached him, he breaks out upon it, and from that moment never ceases to persecute it, in every form of ingenious torture, until, in the seventy-fourth, he brings his own work to its conclusion. Even Sancho, with his accustomed humor and simplicity, is let loose upon the unhappy Aragonese; for, having understood from a chance traveller who first brings the book to their knowledge, that his wife is called in it Mary Gutierrez, instead of Teresa Panza,—
“‘A pretty sort of a history-writer,’ cried Sancho, ‘and a deal must he know of our affairs, if he calls Teresa Panza, my wife, Mary Gutierrez. Take the book again, Sir, and see if I am put into it, and if he has changed my name, too.’ ‘By what I hear you say, my friend,’ replied the stranger, ‘you are, no doubt, Sancho Panza, the esquire of Don Quixote.’ ‘To be sure I am,’ answered Sancho, ‘and proud of it, too.’ ‘Then, in truth,’ said the gentleman, ‘this new author does not treat you with the propriety shown in your own person; he makes you a glutton and a fool; not at all amusing, and quite another thing from the Sancho described in the first part of your master’s history.’ ‘Well, Heaven forgive him!’ said Sancho; ‘but I think he might have left me in my corner, without troubling himself about me; for, Let him play that knows the way; and, Saint Peter at Rome is well off at home.’”[185]
Stimulated by the appearance of this rival work, as well as offended with its personalities, Cervantes urged forward his own, and, if we may judge by its somewhat hurried air, brought it to a conclusion sooner than he had intended.[186] At any rate, as early as February, 1615, it was finished, and was published in the following autumn; after which we hear nothing more of Avellaneda, though he had intimated his purpose to exhibit Don Quixote in another series of adventures at Avila, Valladolid, and Salamanca.[187] This, indeed, Cervantes took some pains to prevent; for—besides a little changing his plan, and avoiding the jousts at Saragossa, because Avellaneda had carried his hero there[188]—he finally restores Don Quixote, through a severe illness, to his right mind, and makes him renounce all the follies of knight-errantry, and die, like a peaceful Christian, in his own bed;—thus cutting off the possibility of another continuation with the pretensions of the first.