The History of Don Quixote de la Mancha

by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

The next year Cervantes published another small work, entitled the Viage de Parnasso, or 'A Journey to Parnassus,' which is a playful satire upon the Spanish poets, after the manner of Cæsar Caporali's upon the Italian poets under a similar title. It is a good picture of the Spanish literature of his day, and one of the most powerful of his poetical works. It is full of satire, though not ill-natured, and there was no man of genius of the time who would complain of being too harshly treated in it. Cervantes introduces himself as the oldest and poorest of all the poetical fraternity, "the naked Adam of Spanish poets." The plot of the poem is as follows:—Apollo wishes to rid Parnassus of the bad poets, and to that end he calls together all the others by a message through Mercury. When all assembled, he leads them into a rich garden of Parnassus, and assigns to each the place which corresponds to his merits. Poor Cervantes alone does not obtain this distinction, and remains without being noticed in the presence of the rest, before whom all the works he has ever published are displayed. In vain does he urge his love for literature, and the troubles which he had endured for its sake; no seat can he get. At last Apollo, in compassion upon him, advises him to fold up his cloak, and to make that his seat; but, alas, so poor is he that he does not possess such a thing, and so he is obliged to remain standing in spite of his age, his talents, and the opinion of many who know and confess the honour and position which is his due. The vessel in which this 'Journey to Parnassus' is performed is described in a way quite worthy of Cervantes: "From topmast to keel it was all of verse; not one foot of prose was there in it. The airy railings which fenced the deck were all of double-rhymes. Ballads, an impudent but necessary race, occupied the rowing-benches; and rightly, for there is nothing to which they may not be turned. The poop was grand and gay, but somewhat strange in its style, being stuck all over with sonnets of the richest workmanship. The stroke-oars on either side were pulled by two vigorous triplets, which regulated the motion of the vessel in a way both easy and powerful. The gangway was one long and most melancholy elegy, from which tears were continually dropping."

The publication of a shameful imitation, pretending to be a Second Part of the Adventures of Don Quixote accelerated the production of Cervantes' own Second Part; which accordingly made its appearance at the beginning of 1615. Contrary to common experience, this Second Part was received, and deservedly, with as great applause as was the First Part ten years before.

Cervantes had now but a few more months to live; and it must, in his declining years, have been a great consolation to find that the efforts of his genius were still appreciated by his countrymen; not to mention the relief from pecuniary embarrassments which the profits of the sale must have afforded him. Cervantes was now at the height to which his ambition had all along aimed; he had no rival; for Lope de Vega was dead, and the literary kingdom of Spain was all his own. He was courted by the great; no strangers came to Madrid without making the writer of Don Quixote the first object of their inquiry; he reposed in honour, free from all calumny, in the bosom of his family.

This same year he published eight comedies, and the same number of interludes; two only in verse, the rest in prose. It does not seem likely that these were written at this time; they must have been the works of his earlier years; but, like his novels, corrected and given to the public when his judgment was more mature. Several of them had, no doubt, been performed on the stage many years before, and remained with Cervantes in manuscript. The dissertation which he prefixed to them is full of interest, and is very curious and valuable, since it contains the only account we have of the early history of the Spanish drama.

In 1616, he completed and prepared for the press a romance entitled Persiles and Sigismunda, of a grave character, written in imitation of the Ethiopics of Heliodorus; it was the work of many years, and is accounted by the Spaniards one of the purest specimens of Castilian writing. He finished it just before his death, but never lived to see it published. The dedication and prologue of Persiles and Sigismunda are very affecting; they are the voice of a dying man speaking to us of his approaching dissolution.

From the nature of his complaint, Cervantes retained his mental faculties to the very last, and so was able to be the historian of his latter days. At the end of the preface to Persiles, he tells us that he had gone for a few days to Esquivias, in hopes that country air might be beneficial to him. On his return to Madrid, he was accompanied by his friends, when a young student on horseback overtook them, riding very hard to do so, and complaining in consequence of the rapid pace at which they were going. One of the three made answer that it was no fault of theirs, but that the horse of Miguel de Cervantes was to be blamed, whose trot was none of the slowest. Scarcely had the name been pronounced, when the young man dismounted; and touching the border of Cervantes' left sleeve, exclaimed, "Yes, yes, it is indeed the maimed perfection, the all-famous, the delightful writer, the joy and darling of the Muses." This salutation was returned with Cervantes' natural modesty; and the worthy student performed the rest of the journey with him and his friends. "We drew up a little," says Cervantes, "and rode on at a measured pace; and whilst we rode, we happened to talk of my illness. The good student soon knocked away all my hopes, and let me know my doom, by telling me that it was a dropsy that I had got: the thirst attending which, not all the waters of the ocean, though it were not salt, could suffice to quench. 'Therefore, Senor Cervantes,' said he, 'you must drink nothing at all, but forget not to eat, and to eat plentifully; that alone will recover you without any physic.' 'Others have told me the same,' answered I; 'but I can no more forbear drinking, than if I had been born to nothing else. My life is fast drawing to a close; and from the state of my pulse, I think I can scarcely outlive Sunday next at the utmost; so that I hardly think I shall profit by the acquaintance so fortunately made. But adieu, my merry friends all; for I am going to die; and I hope to see you again ere long in the next world as happy as hearts can desire.' With that, we found ourselves at the bridge of Toledo, by which we entered the city; and the student took leave of us, having to go round by the bridge of Segovia."

This is all that we know of the last sickness of Cervantes: it was dropsy, and this dropsy, according to his own prediction to the student, increased so rapidly, that a few days after, on the 18th of April, 1616, he was considered to be past recovery, and it was thought advisable for him to receive the last sacrament of extreme unction, which he accordingly did with all the devotion of a pious Catholic.

He died on the 23d day of April, 1616, in the sixty-ninth year of his age; and was buried in the habit of the Franciscans, whose order he had entered some time previous to his decease. It is a coincidence worth remembering, that Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra terminated his mortal course in Spain on the very same day that William Shakspere died in England.

As regards style of composition, Cervantes is without a rival in the Spanish language. For the purity of his writing, he is even to this day acknowledged, not only to be first, but to have no one who can come near enough to be called second to him. But this is not his greatest praise. He must ever be remembered as the originator of a kind of writing, which the greatest of men since his time have thought it an honour, of whatever country they may have been, to imitate. All modern romance-writers, and novel-writers (and what a mighty host are they!) must be content to be accounted the followers of Miguel de Cervantes.

With regard to Don Quixote, it need hardly be said that its object is satire upon the books of knight-errantry, which were so much used in the time of Cervantes, and especially by the Spanish. He conceived that these books were likely to give his countrymen false ideas of the world; to fill them all, but especially the young, with fanciful notions of life, and so make them unfit to meet its real difficulties and hardships. In order to exhibit the absurdity of such works (it must be remembered too, that the more famous books of knighthood had given rise to a host of spurious imitations, with all their faults and none of their beauties), the author of Don Quixote represents a worthy gentleman with his head turned by such reading, and then sallying forth and endeavouring to act in this plain matter-of-fact world (where there are windmills, and not giants—inns, and not castles—good honest hosts and hostesses, and not lords and ladies—chambermaids, and not peerless beauties—estates to be got by hard labour, and not islands to be given away to one's dependants as if by enchantment), endeavouring to act, we say, as if all that was said in Amadis de Gaul, and Palmerin of England, and Olivante de Laura, were really true. The absurdities into which the poor gentleman's madness constantly hurries him, the stern and bitter satire which is conveyed in these against the books which caused them all, did more towards putting down the extravagances of knight-errantry than many volumes of the bitterest invective. We of this present day cannot be really alive to all the great genius displayed in Don Quixote. The books which it satirises are now almost unknown; many who have heard of Amadis de Gaul have never read it, and still less have they read all the lineage of the Amadis. Besides, in some of the first of the chivalrous romances, such as Palmerin of England, the Morte d'Arthur, and others, there was undoubtedly very much talent and beauty of sentiment: and it was as such that Southey thought it right to translate them and present them to the English public some years ago; and deeply indebted are we all to him for his labours, which revived among us somewhat of the taste for the old and stately prose of the ancient romances—a taste which in our day has given rise to those beautiful editions in English of the tales of De la Motte Fouqué. But we must ever remember that it was not for the purpose of ridiculing those and similar books that Cervantes wrote his "history"—one so keenly alive to the beauty of the poetry of the mediæval writing as he was, never could have intended such a thing: it was to exterminate the race of miserable imitators, who, at his time, deluged Europe with sickening caricatures of the old romance. It has even been thought that he had intended another course in order to cure the disease, namely, that of himself composing a model romance in the style of Amadis, which, from its excellence, would make manifest the follies of men who had endeavoured to imitate that almost inimitable work. But the disease was past cure; the limb was obliged to be amputated; books of knight-errantry could not be reformed, he thought; and so rather than let them continue their mischief in their present shape, they must be quite destroyed; and this the satire of Don Quixote was by its author considered the most proper means of effecting.