The sixteenth-century prose-pastoral was a barren product, rooted in a false convention. It was not natural, and it was not artistic: it failed to reproduce the beauty of the old ideal, and it failed to create a modern ideal. It satisfies no canon, and to attempt to make a case for it is to argue for argument’s sake. Had Cervantes continued to work this vein, he would never have found his true path, and must have remained an imitator till the end; and it is a mere chance that he did not return to the pastoral and complete the Galatea. It was far too often in his thoughts. As his butt Feliciano de Silva would have said, his reason saw ‘the unreason of the reason with which the reason is afflicted’ when given up to the composition of pastorals; and yet the pastoral romance had a fascination for him. Fortunately, he was saved from a fatal error by the fact that, for nearly twenty years after the publication of the Galatea, he was kept against his will in touch with the realities of life: realities often grim, squalid, fantastic, cruel and absurd, but preferable to the pointless philanderings of imaginary swains and nymphs in a pasteboard Arcadia. The surly taxpayers from whom Cervantes had to wring contributions, the clergy who excommunicated and imprisoned him, the alcaldes and jacks-in-office who made his life a burden, the cheating landlords and strumpets whom he met in miserable inns—these people were not the crown and flower of the human race, but they were not intangible abstractions, nor even persistent bores; they were plain men and women, creatures of flesh and blood, subject to all the passions of humanity, and using vigorous, natural speech instead of euphemisms and preciosities. It was by contact with these rugged folk that Cervantes amassed his wealth of observation, and slowly learned his trade. This was precisely what he needed. After his return from Algiers, and till his marriage, circumstances had thrown him into a literary clique, well-read and well-meaning, but with no vital knowledge of the past and no intellectual interest in the present. The destiny which drove Cervantes to collect provisions and taxes in the villages of the south saved him from the Byzantinism of the capital, and placed him once more in direct relation with nature—especially human nature. This was his salvation as an author. And eighteen years later he produced the First Part of Don Quixote.
It would be interesting to know the exact stages of composition of Don Quixote, but that is hopeless. We cannot be sure as to when Cervantes began the book, but we may hazard a conjecture. Bernardo de la Vega’s Pastor de Iberia, one of the books in Don Quixote’s library, was published in 1591, and this goes to prove that the sixth chapter was written after this date—probably a good deal later, for this pastoral was a failure, and therefore not likely to come at once into the hands of a busy, roving tax-gatherer. You all remember the incident of Sancho Panza’s being tossed in a blanket, and there is a very similar episode in the Third Book of Guzmán de Alfarache. Is there any relation between the two? Is it a case of unconscious reminiscence, or is it simple coincidence? It would be absurd to suppose that Cervantes deliberately took such a trifling incident from a book published six years before his own. Where Cervantes is imitative is in the dedication of the First Part of Don Quixote, which is pieced together from Herrera’s dedication of his edition of Garcilaso to the Marqués de Ayamonte, and from Francisco de Medina’s prologue to the same edition. If the tossing of Sancho Panza were suggested by Guzmán de Alfarache, it would follow that the seventeenth chapter of Don Quixote was written in 1599, or later, and a remark dropped by Ginés de Pasamonte seems to show that Cervantes had read Mateo Alemán’s book without any excessive admiration. But the point is scarcely worth labouring. My own impression is that Don Quixote was progressing, but was not yet finished, in 1602.
Consider the facts a moment! So far as external evidence goes we have no information concerning Cervantes from May 1601 to February 1603, but I suggest that he was in Seville during 1602. We know that Lope de Vega was constantly in Seville from 1600 to 1604, and we know that Cervantes wrote a complimentary sonnet for the edition of the Dragontea issued by Lope in 1602. The inference is that Cervantes and Lope were on friendly terms at this date, and it is therefore incredible that Cervantes had written—or even contemplated writing—the sharp attack on Lope in the forty-seventh chapter of Don Quixote. During the course of 1602 differences arose to separate the two men, and thenceforward Cervantes felt free to treat Lope as an ordinary mortal, an author who invited trenchant criticism. This would lead us to suppose that Don Quixote was not actually finished till just before Cervantes’s departure to Valladolid at the beginning of 1603, and it would also explain how Lope de Vega became acquainted with the contents of Don Quixote before it was actually published. Cervantes is pleasantly chatty and confidential in print respecting the books upon which he is at work; he is not likely to have been more reserved in private conversation with a friend. And it is intrinsically probable that at this difficult period of his life Cervantes may have made many confidences to Lope concerning his projects.
At first sight it may seem odd that we hear nothing of Cervantes’s mingling in the literary circles of Seville; it may seem still more strange, if we take into consideration the fact that several of the poets whom he had praised in the Galatea were then living in Seville. But there is nothing strange about it, if we look at men and things from a contemporary point of view. The plain truth is that at this time Cervantes was a nobody in the eyes of educated people at Seville. His steps had been persistently dogged by failure. He had failed as a dramatist, and as a writer of romance; he had been discharged from the public service under a cloud, and his imprisonment would not recommend him to the Philistines. Highly respectable literary persons closed their doors to him, and in these circumstances Lope’s companionship would be most welcome. From these small details we may fairly infer that Don Quixote was not finished till the very end of 1602, and that the final touches were not given till Cervantes went to Valladolid in 1603, a perfectly insignificant figure in the eyes of literary men and literary patrons. He was still nothing but a seedy elderly hack when Don Quixote was licensed in September 1604. The book stole into the market at the beginning of 1605, with no great expectation of success on the part of the publisher who had it printed in a commonplace, careless fashion, and left it to take its chance on his counter at the price of eight and a half reales. We all know the result. From the outset Don Quixote was immensely popular, and from that day to this the author’s reputation has steadily increased—till now he ranks as one of the great immortals. The history of literature shows no more enduring triumph.
Cervantes himself tells us that Don Quixote is, ‘from beginning to end, an attack upon the books of chivalry,’ and no doubt he means this assertion to be taken literally. But, as I have said elsewhere, the statement must be interpreted rationally in the light of other facts. It is quite true that books of chivalry had been a public pest, that grave scholars and theologians thundered against them, and that legislation was invoked to prevent their introduction into the blameless American colonies. The mystic Malón de Chaide, writing in 1588, declared that these extravagances were as dangerous as a knife in a madman’s hand; but Malón de Chaide lived sequestered from the world, and was evidently not aware that public taste had changed since he was young. It is a significant fact that no romance of chivalry was printed at Madrid during the reign of Philip II., and the natural conclusion is that such publications were then popular only in country districts. The previous twenty years of Cervantes’s life had been passed in the provinces, and one might be tempted to imagine that he was unaware of what was happening elsewhere. This would be an error: the fact that he mentions his own Rinconete y Cortadillo in Don Quixote proves that he knew there was a demand for picaresque stories, and that he was prepared to satisfy it. The probability is that Cervantes, who lived much in the past, had intended to write a short travesty of a chivalresque novel, and that his original intention remained present in his mind long after he had exceeded it in practice. If any one chooses to insist that Cervantes gave the romances of chivalry their death-blow, we are not concerned to deny it; if he had done nothing more, it would have been an inglorious victory, for they were already at the last extremity: but in truth, though he himself may have been unconscious of it, in writing Don Quixote Cervantes signalised the triumph of the modern spirit over mediævalism.
He had set out impelled by the spirit of burlesque, and perhaps had met in his wanderings on the King’s commission some quaint belated personage who seemed a survival from a picturesque, idealistic age, and who invited good-natured caricature. With some such intention, Cervantes began a tale, which, so far as he could foresee, would be no longer than some of his Exemplary Novels (of which one, at least, was already written); but the experiment was a new one, and the author himself was at the mercy of accidents. He saw little more than the possibilities of his central idea: a country gentleman who had become a monomaniac by incessant pondering over fabulous deeds, and who was led into ridiculous situations by attempting to imitate the imaginary exploits of his mythical heroes. Cervantes sets forth light-heartedly; pictures his gaunt hero arguing with Master Nicolás, the village barber, over the relative merits of Palmerín and Amadís; and finally presents him aflame with an enthusiasm which drives him to furbish up his great-grandfather’s armour, to go out to right every kind of wrong, and to win everlasting renown (as well as the empire of Trebizond). Parodies, burlesque allusions, humorous parallels crowd upon the writer, and his pen flies trippingly along till he reaches the third chapter. At this point Cervantes perceives the subject broadening out, and the landlord accordingly impresses on Don Quixote the necessity of providing himself with a squire.
It is a momentous passage: there and then the image of Sancho Panza first flashed into the author’s mind, but not with any definition of outline. Cervantes does not venture to introduce Sancho Panza in person till near the end of the seventh chapter, and he is visibly ill at ease over his new creation. It is quite plain that, at this stage, Cervantes knew very little about Sancho Panza, and his first remark is that the squire was an honest man (if any poor man can be called honest), ‘but with very little sense in his pate.’ This is not the Sancho who has survived: honesty is not the most pre-eminent quality of the squire, and if anybody thinks Sancho Panza a born fool he must have a high standard of ability. In the ninth chapter Cervantes goes out of his way to describe Sancho Panza as a long-legged man: obviously, up to this point, he had never seen the squire at close quarters, and was as yet not nearly so well acquainted with him as you and I are. He was soon to know him more intimately. Perceiving his mistake, he hustled the long-legged scarecrow out of sight, observed the real Sancho with minute fidelity, and created the most richly humorous character in modern literature. The only possible rival to Sancho Panza is Sir John Falstaff; but Falstaff is emphatically English, whereas Sancho Panza is a citizen of the world, stamped with the seal of universality.
It can scarcely be doubted that Don Quixote contains many allusions to contemporaries and contemporary events. We can catch the point of his jests at Lope de Vega’s fondness for a classical reference, or at a geographical blunder made by the learned Mariana; but probably many an allusion of the same kind escapes us in Cervantes’s pages. The same may be said of Shakespeare, and hence both Cervantes and Shakespeare have been much exposed to the attentions of commentators. In a celebrated passage of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream Oberon addresses Puck:—
Thou rememberest
Since once I sat upon a promontory,