In the distant island of Britain some rough country fellows trained themselves to shoot arrows through the joints of the knightly armor. A little later came the invention of gunpowder, and that finished the hard-shell crabs on horseback. But the literary world also resembles a crab, in that it walks backward, with its eyes on the past. Invariably you find that what is called scholarship and culture is several generations behind the practical life of men; and so the poets went on composing elaborate and fantastic romances of chivalry. The test of excellence in literature was the refinement and elegance and remoteness from life of this perverted leisure-class art: until Cervantes came along and laughed it to death.
He was born in Spain in the middle of the sixteenth century, noble but poor. He first lived his great book, and then in old age he wrote it. He went to Rome in the retinue of a papal ambassador, and later on took up the chivalrous career, a crusade. The Turks were in possession of the Mediterranean, and the Spaniards were trying to drive them out; Cervantes, though ill of a fever, fought desperately at the battle of Lepanto, and was twice wounded. After five years of such war he was sailing home, when the Turks captured him, and for several years he was a slave in Algiers—a gallant and romantic slave, the darling of his companions and the terror of his masters. He made several attempts to escape, and finally was ransomed by his relatives, and came home to Spain, crippled and poor—to reflect, like so many returned soldiers, upon the bitterness of dead glory.
He became a government agent, collecting naval stores. He was not a great success: one of his subordinates defaulted, and he was put in prison. He lived in straitened circumstances, in a household with five women relatives and his sense of humor. Then he tried writing; for twenty years he wrote every kind of thing which a man of his time could imagine would bring a living, but all in vain. He was not a university man and so the critics of his time considered him presumptuous in attempting to break into their sacred ranks. Until he was fifty-eight his life was a failure.
Then he hit upon the idea of ridiculing the established literature of chivalry, by bringing it into contact with the every-day realities of Spain. He created a character very much like himself; except that the old Don Quixote had read so many romances that his head was turned, and he began to take them seriously, mounted his old nag and rode out to rescue damsels, and to mistake a barber’s basin shining in the sun for a helmet, and wind-mills for giants who must be overthrown. The story rambles along from one comical adventure to the next, and brings in almost every type of person in Spain. It became an instant and enormously popular success; but poor Cervantes got practically nothing out of it, because editions were pirated all over the country. He was a failure to the end—and curiously enough, did not get any satisfaction even from his fame. He was ashamed of his popular book, and quite sure that mankind would some day appreciate his long poems, “The Journey to Parnassus,” and the pastoral romance, “Galatea,” and the romantic poem, “Persiles and Sigismunda.”
Many of the world’s greatest writers have thus fallen victim to culture-snobbery. Shakespeare was despised by the academic critics of his own time, and apparently did not think enough of his own plays to see that posterity got a correct edition of them. When I was a boy we all read “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn,” and “laughed our heads off” over them; but if anybody had suggested to us that Mark Twain might be one of the world’s great writers, we should have thought it a Mark Twain joke.
“Don Quixote” was produced, definitely and deliberately, as a piece of propaganda. We no longer know even the names of these long-winded romances of chivalry, so we do not realize that the author, in ridiculing them, is trying to teach us something. Also, there is another kind of propaganda that Cervantes put into the book, his ideas concerning one of the gravest problems confronting mankind through the ages. What shall be the relation of the idealist, the dreamer of good and beautiful things, to the world of ugliness and greed in which he finds himself? He has a vision of something splendid, but the world knows nothing about that vision, and cannot be made to understand it; if he tries to apply it, the world will call him crazy, it will treat him so badly that before he gets through he may be really crazy. But what, after all, is it to be crazy? Is it to believe in the possibility of something splendid in life? Or is it to believe that life must always be the hateful and ugly thing we now see it?
Nobody can be sure just how much Cervantes realized all this himself. There are many cases of men of genius writing, out of their sorrow and their laughter, things more wise and more deep than they know. Did Shakespeare intend Shylock to be a comic character, to be howled at and pelted by the Jew-hating mob of his time, or did he realize that in this half-comic, half-tragic figure he was voicing the grief and protest of a persecuted race?
What Cervantes has done in “Don Quixote” is to supply the critics and interpreters with material for speculation through many ages to come. He gave his crack-brained old gentleman a devoted servant, with no particle of his master’s idealism or insanity. Sancho Panza is entirely normal, from the world’s point of view, a sturdy and practical fellow; yet he gets into just as many absurd scrapes as his master—because he is ignorant, and is betrayed by his own greed. So we are brought back again and again to the question: Who is it that is really crazy in this shifting and uncertain world? Is a reader of literature insane because he sets out to apply the ideas of that literature in real life? Or does insanity lie with writers who produce and critics who praise literature which cannot be applied to real life, and is not intended to be so applied? If, as I believe, the latter answer is correct—then how many foolish persons there are writing books today!
It is interesting to note how many of the world’s great monuments of art were produced by men who saw their country traveling the road to ruin, and pleaded in vain with the ruling classes. Cervantes himself was a devout Catholic, and would not have understood us if we had told him that Don Quixote typified the Spain of his time; the Spain which believed that the human mind could be shackled by religious bigotry, and forced by dungeon and torture and the stake to accept a set of theological dogmas. The Spaniards slaughtered or drove into exile their most intelligent population, the Moors; and Cervantes approved it. They set out to conquer the world for their hateful faith, and Cervantes saw their powerful Armada overthrown and destroyed by the little ships of sturdy, independent Englishmen, who had recently kicked out the pope from their country and taken charge of their own thinking. This pope had by formal decree presented England to Spain; but the old, crack-brained Don Quixote empire had been unable to take possession, and the sad gentleman-soldier, Cervantes, died without having understood any of these world-events.