Chapters on Spanish Literature

by James Fitzmaurice-Kelly

To the mind of an English reader, this passage recalls the recondite preciosity of Juliet:—

Hath Romeo slain himself? say thou but ‘I,’

And that bare vowel, ‘I,’ shall poison more

Than the death-darting eye of cockatrice:

I am not I, if there be such an I,

Or those eyes shut, that make thee answer ‘I.’

These exhibitions of verbal ingenuity are a blemish in the early chapters of Don Quixote and in Romeo and Juliet. At this stage of their development both Cervantes and Shakespeare were struggling to disengage their genius from the clutch of contemporary affectation, and both succeeded. As Don Quixote progresses the parody of the books of chivalry becomes less insistent, the style grows more supple and adaptable, reaches a high level of restrained eloquence in the knight’s speeches, is forcible and familiar in expressing the squire’s artful simplicity, is invariably appropriate in the mouths of men differing so widely from each other as Vivaldo and the Barber, Ginés de Pasamonte and Cardenio, Don Fernando and the left-handed landlord, the Captive and the village priest. The dramatic fitness of the dialogue in Don Quixote, its intense life and speedy movement are striking innovations in the development of the Spanish novel, and give the book its abiding air of modernity. Cervantes had discovered the great secret that truth is a more essential element of artistic beauty than all the academic elegance in the world.

But the immediate triumph of Don Quixote was not due—or, at least, was not mainly due—to strictly artistic qualities. These make an irresistible appeal to us, who belong to a more analytic and sophisticated generation. To contemporary readers the charm of Don Quixote lay in its amalgamation of imaginative and realistic elements, in its accumulated episodes, in its infinite sympathy, and its pervasive humour. There was no question then as to whether Don Quixote was a well of symbolic doctrine. The canvas was crowded with types familiar to every one who had eyes to see his companions on the dusty highways of Spain. The wenches who served Don Quixote with stockfish and black bread; the lad Andrés, flayed in the grove of oaks by Juan Haldudo the Rich, of Quintanar; the goatherds seated round the fire on which the pot of salted goat was simmering; the three lively needle-makers from the Colt of Córdoba; the midnight procession escorting the dead body from Baeza to Segovia, and chanting dirges on the road; the dozen galley-slaves tramping on, strung together like beads on an iron chain—all these are observed and presented with masterly precision of detail. But the really triumphant creations of the book are, of course, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza—the impassioned idealist and the incarnation of gross common-sense. They were instantly accepted as great representative figures; the adventures of the fearless Manchegan madman and his timorous practical squire were speedily reprinted in the capital and the provinces; and within six months a writer in Valladolid assumed as a matter of course that his correspondent in the Portuguese Indies must have made the acquaintance of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

One of the most attractive characteristics of Don Quixote is its maturity; it may not have taken more than three or four years to write, but it embodies the experience of a lifetime, and it breathes an air of urbanity and leisure. Cervantes was not an exceptionally rapid writer, and—if he thought about the matter at all—probably knew that masterpieces are seldom produced in a hurry. His great rival Lope de Vega easily surpassed him in brilliant facility: Cervantes’s mind was weightier, less fleet but more precise. In the closing sentences of Don Quixote he had half promised a continuation, and no doubt it occupied his thoughts for many years. He had set himself a most formidable task—the task of equalling himself at his best—and he may well have shrunk from it, for he was risking his hard-won reputation on a doubtful hazard. He was in no haste to put his fortune to the touch. He sank into a pregnant silence, pondered over the technique of his great design, and, with the exception of an occasional sonnet, published nothing for eight years. At last in 1613 he issued his Novelas Exemplares, twelve short stories, the composition of which was spread over a long space of time. One of these, Rinconete y Cortadillo, is mentioned in Don Quixote, and must therefore date from 1602 or earlier; a companion story, the Coloquio de los Perros, is assigned to 1608; and the remaining ten are plausibly believed to have been written between these dates. The two tales just mentioned are the gems of the collection, but La Gitanilla and El Celoso extremeño are scarcely less striking, and certainly seven out of the dozen are models of realistic art. Cervantes was never troubled by mock-modesty, and ingenuously asserts that he was ‘the first to attempt novels in the Castilian tongue, for the many which wander about in print in Spanish are all translated from foreign languages, while these are my own, neither imitated nor stolen.’ There were earlier collections of stories (from one of which—Eslava’s Noches de Invierno—Shakespeare contrived to borrow the plot of The Tempest), but they are eclipsed by the Novelas Exemplares. These, in their turn, are overshadowed by Don Quixote, but they would suffice to make the reputation of any novelist by their fine invention and engaging fusion of truth with fantasy. The harshest of native critics yielded to the spell, and the Novelas Exemplares were skilfully exploited by John Fletcher and by Middleton and Rowley in England, as well as by Hardy in France.

Cervantes had now so unquestionably succeeded in prose that he was tempted to bid for fame as a poet. He mistrusted his own powers, and, as the event proved, with reason. His Viage del Parnaso, published in 1614, commemorated the most prominent versifiers of the day in a spirit of mingled appreciation and satirical criticism. It is very doubtful whether there have been so many great poets in the history of the world as Cervantes descried among his Spanish contemporaries, and his compliments are too effusive and too universal to be effective. A noble amateur, a potential patron, is lauded as extravagantly as though he were the equal of Lope or Góngora, and the occasional excursions into satire are mostly pointless. There are more wit, and pungency, and concentrated force in any two pages of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers than in all the cantos of the Viage del Parnaso put together. It cannot be merely owing to temperamental differences that Byron succeeds where Cervantes fails. There are splenetic passages in the Viage relating to such writers as Bernardo de la Vega and the author of La Pícara Justina, but they miss their mark. The simple truth is—not that Cervantes was willing to wound and yet afraid to strike, but—that he had no complete mastery of his instrument.