Introduction

“Cervantes—a patient gentleman who wrote a book—has been seated in the Elysian Fields for three centuries now, where he casts melancholy glances about him as he waits for a descendant to be born who shall be capable of understanding him.” JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET

 

It was early in the year 1605 that the Madrid book-seller Francisco de Robles placed on sale a wretchedly printed volume from the press of Juan de la Cuesta, entitled The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha. The author, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, then in his fifty-eighth year, was all but unknown. His brilliant contemporaries of Spain’s Golden Age—Lope de Vega and the many others—insofar as they were aware of his existence, doubtless looked upon him as a literary failure and a hack. Old and poverty-stricken, with a maimed left hand and other wounds incurred in the battle of Lepanto, he had been writing poems, plays, and pastoral romances for a quarter of a century with an equal lack of success. Back in 1595 he had won a first prize, consisting of three silver spoons, in a poetry contest (if that may be termed success), and three years later his verses for the funeral of Philip II had attracted some attention. So far as either recognition or achievement went, there was little more than that.

Yet Cervantes had worked hard, desperately hard, at the new trade he had chosen in his mid-thirties. Spurred on by want and the burden of a large household, he had turned to the theater in the hope of monetary gain, and in the 1580s, so it was said, had written between twenty and thirty unactable plays in three years’ time, though only two of these earlier pieces have come down to us. On one occasion we find him contracting with a theatrical manager for six comedies at fifty ducats (about thirty dollars) each. And it was, no doubt, the need of money that led him to undertake the composition of a tale destined to become one of the world’s greatest fictional masterpieces.

Age without a substantial means of support has its terrors for any man, and Cervantes’ life had been filled to overflowing with hardships and misfortunes. It was not alone in literature that he had failed. Despite his battle scars and his honorable record as a soldier, which included a period spent as a captive of the Moors in Tunis, he had been unable to obtain military preferment. Refused a coveted post in the Indies, he had been appointed a tax gatherer for the Crown, only to be thrown into prison for a shortage in his accounts—there was even an unfounded rumor to the effect that the first part of Don Quixote had been composed in a prison cell. In short, had his been a nature that was capable of knowing an ultimate despair, had it not been for that high courage and profound geniality that are so close to the heart of his genius, Cervantes might well have considered himself a failure in every worldly respect: as poet, dramatist, novelist, soldier, public official and, finally, as a husband and family man.

And now with the years his health was deteriorating, his eyes were dimming, his poverty was growing ever more oppressive, his responsibilities more onerous. What, then, could be more natural than that his thoughts should keep coming back to the idea of producing a popular work that might bring him in a little money while he labored at what he believed to be more important tasks from the aesthetic point of view, such as would give him a lasting fame? It was also natural that, in casting about for a theme, he thought of those romances of chivalry that had enjoyed so tremendous a vogue in the sixteenth century but were already beginning to fall into disrepute. Why not a humorous parody on these high-flown chronicles with their impossible adventures and knightly deeds of valor? The subject matter would be familiar while the treatment would be novel and mirth-provoking. An aging and threadbare but noble-minded country gentleman has read so many books of chivalry that he has gone strangely “mad” on this one subject alone, and he now resolves to turn knight-errant and sally forth in quest of adventure along the highways of the modern world. Here was a tale that offered unlimited possibilities, and one that was to grow with the telling.

There are, I know, those who will disagree with such a view of the genesis of Don Quixote,who would have it that Cervantes sat down and, from the start, carefully plotted out an involved masterpiece of baroque art. This is a question that will be discussed later on. Here, I may merely state my own humble opinion—that of one who has lived with Cervantes for a good many years and who has wrestled with the task of translating him—which is that the author’s original intention was to write a book that would have a widely popular appeal. It was to be a book addressed not to the cultivated few of the Spanish Renaissance but rather to the innkeepers, page boys, students, soldiers, as well as the dukes and duchesses of the realm, that great newly literate audience that the printing press had brought into existence.

There has been a good deal of debate as to whether or not Cervantes was a “careless” writer—this, despite the rather numerous and glaring slips and inconsistencies that are to be discovered in his text; but one thing, as Professor Rudolph Schevill has pointed out, appears certain: he neither revised the manuscript nor read proofs on the Don Quixote but left it to the printer’s far from tender mercies. The result of such negligence is to be viewed in the jumbled episode of the theft of Sancho’s ass, in Part I, and in minor discrepancies throughout the work.

Such was the book that Francisco de Robles found on his hands. What did he think of it? We may ask ourselves: What would a present-day publisher think of an author nearing sixty whose reputation was still to be made? Would he be likely to expect either a masterpiece—say, the great American novel—or a best-seller? He certainly would not look for a story that would revolutionize the art of fiction and become one of the best-sellers of all time. And Robles apparently felt the same way about it, for he did not take the trouble to protect either his own or the author’s rights beyond the confines of Castile. Then the miracle occurred. Pirated editions began to appear almost at once, and there were five printings within a year, including a second authorized one the rights for which, this time, were secured not only for Castile but for Aragón and Portugal as well. All these editions were exhausted in less than three years.

By 1610 the whole of Spain was laughing over the fantastic adventures of the windmill-tilting Don and the inimitable drolleries of Sancho Panza. The king on his balcony one day, so runs the anecdote, glanced down into the street and saw a student walking along, book in hand. The youth was slapping his forehead and roaring with merriment, which led His Majesty to remark: “I’ll wager that young man is reading Don Quixote.” About the only ones who did not join in the great popular chorus of appreciation were the intellectuals, Lope de Vega and his friends and the followers of Góngora, the culto poets; and it was with them that the making of literary reputations lay. No one, Lope declared, would be so foolish as to praise the book. He had been offended by the criticism of his own work which it contained, but other writers were similarly cold and silent toward it. The people, on the other hand, promptly took it to themselves and claimed it for their own; and it was not until a couple of centuries later that artists and thinkers began to discover its true aesthetic worth and philosophic depth of meaning. The legend of the slapstick farceur gave way to a Cervantes who now seems so big and many-sided as to elude all our attempts to comprehend him fully.

The author’s fame, meanwhile, was spreading rapidly in other lands. In 1607, two years after the first publication of Don Quixote, an edition appeared at Brussels, and the following year Robles brought out a third printing, making seven in all. There was an Italian edition at Milan in 1610, and a second one at Brussels in 1611. Nine editions of Part I were published during Cervantes lifetime, between 1605 and 1616, and a tenth came out at Barcelona the year after his death. Part II, published in 1615, fared equally well, with five editions inside of two years, all copies of which were gone by 1634. Meanwhile the translators were also busy, and within twenty years, by 1625, English, French, German, and Italian renderings were to be had. The first to appear was Shelton’s version of Part I in 1612. This will serve to give an idea of the book’s immediate and ever-growing popularity.

Today Don Quixote has been translated into more than a hundred languages, including such idioms as Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, and Tibetan. In this respect it is exceeded only by the Bible—a fact which reminds one of Sainte-Beuve’s description of it as “the Bible of humanity.” “Of all the books in the world,” says John Ormsby in his introduction to his translation of the Don Quixote (1885), “Don Quixote is the most catholic.” The author himself was well aware of this universal appeal, and through the mouth of the bachelor Sans6n Carrasco is to be heard boasting that “there soon will not be a nation that does not know it.” Cervantes was gratified that old and young alike found enjoyment in its pages; and indeed, one may agree with Aubrey F. G. Bell that here is a book that every thinking man who lives out his years should read at least three times: in youth, in middle age, and in his declining days.

As for the effect that Don Quixote has had upon the art of the novel and upon writers in general, there is much to be said. But it is not my purpose to clutter this Introduction by quoting at length from the countless tributes—many of which would sound extravagant to anyone who does not know the work at first hand—that have been paid to Cervantes. It will be sufficient here to state that he has touched the finest creative minds in every major literature (our own Melville is a case in point), has exerted a determining influence on literary and philosophic trends (as in the case of German Romanticism), and has provided inspiration for more than one masterpiece (such as Dostoevski’s The Idiot). Music and the plastic arts also have been affected by him. He has furnished themes for a small library of operas, ballets, and orchestral compositions, and famous artists, from Doré and Cruikshank to Salvador Dali, have done some of their best work in illustrating him.

In twentieth-century America, owing largely to the unattractive, when not spurious, English-language garb in which he has been presented, Cervantes has fallen into a sad neglect that for us is most unfortunate. We have heard a good deal in these recent, postwar years of the plight of our native fictional product. In this connection we might do worse than to recall the words of William Dean Howells, in speaking of Don Quixote: “I cannot help thinking that if we ever have a great American novel, it must be built upon such large and noble lines.” Nor is the aesthetic interest the only one by any means. Cervantes has a life-view, a world-view, that we cannot afford to overlook in this troubled and bemuddled age. How alive he is may be seen when we turn to him with our deepest problems and our latest solutions. This has been superbly brought out by Aubrey Bell in his book-length essay. It was in 1930 that Joseph Wood Krutch took occasion to compare certain aspects of Cervantes’ thinking with the philosophy of “As If.” Listen closely, and you may hear—or fancy that you hear—the voice of the new Jean-Paul whose name is Sartre.

And yet we do not even know the exact date on which this man Miguel de Cervantes was born or where he was buried!

II

Despite all the labor that has been expended by modern scholars, Cervantes’ life, like that of Shakespeare, remains shrouded for the most part in darkness, with only a formal document here and there to serve as a reliable guidepost; all the rest is patchwork and conjecture. His works, naturally, have a certain light to shed upon his career, but it is always difficult and somewhat perilous to undertake to separate the autobiographic strands. If we except Quevedo, Cervantes would seem to have been on terms of friendship with but few of the literary men of his day; as a result not many allusions to him are to be found in the writings of his contemporaries, and no attempt at a biography was made until more than a century after his death. For the facts, the probabilities, and the possibilities as established by trustworthy specialists, the reader can do no better than turn to the recent volume by Entwhistle or the earlier ones by Schevill and Fitzmaurice-Kelly.

As has been said, the day on which the author of Don Quixote was born remains unknown, but it may have been Michaelmas Day, September 29, 1547, since it was this saint whose name he bore. We do know that his birth occurred at Alcalá de Henares, a former university town and a printing center some twenty miles northeast of Madrid, and that he was christened there, in the Church of Santa Maria, on October 9. He came of an old family, from the mountainous region of northern Spain, that had seen better days; and it is possible that among his ancestors there had been more than one knight-errant. His father, Rodrigo de Cervantes, was an apothecary-surgeon and something of a wanderer and ne’er-do-well, though he passed for a gentleman. His grandfather, the advocate Juan de Cervantes, an individual of some prominence, had held important public posts, but Miguel’s immediate family circle was disunited and harassed by debt and financial worries. Of his three brothers, one died in youth, another was killed in the wars. One of his sisters became the prioress of a convent, which appears to indicate that she was possessed of some intelligence and strength of character; the other two led lives that were, to say the least, unconventional.

For the first twenty-one years Cervantes biography is a blank so far as documentary evidence of any kind is concerned. Regarding his adolescence there can be only surmises, but it is safe to assume that he was fond of reading and that he was drawn to poetry and the drama. It may be that his family moved from Alcalá to Madrid when he was about thirteen or fourteen (1560-61); and there are some who see the household as settled in Seville around 1564 and who believe that Miguel attended the Jesuit college there, a supposition that is unlikely in view of the comparatively slight knowledge of the classics that he reveals. There is nothing to show that he had a university education. It may be, however, that he left school to serve with the army in Flanders and then returned to complete his studies, for his soldiering began at an early age.

The first dependable date that we have, following his christening, is 1568, at which time he was a student in the City School of Madrid. By December of the following year he was in Rome as chamberlain to Cardinal Acquaviva. Some months before, in September 1569, a warrant had been issued in Madrid for one Miguel de Cervantes in connection with wounds that had been inflicted in a duel, and he may have fled the country on this account. From Italy he wrote home for a certificate of legitimacy setting forth that he was of “old Christian” stock with no Jewish blood in his veins, such an affidavit being necessary for one who wished to enter the armed forces. Having obtained it, Miguel left the cardinal’s service and enlisted in the Spanish legion stationed in the Italian peninsula. In 1571 he took part in the campaign under John of Austria that culminated in the battle of Lepanto, on October 7.

In this famous naval encounter between Christian and Turk, Cervantes is said to have displayed an almost incredible degree of bravery and endurance. Lying ill with malarial fever, the story goes, he insisted that his comrades carry him on deck so that he could take part in the fight, and even after he had been severely wounded he fought on. Two of his wounds were in the chest; a third one was to deprive him of the use of his left hand for the rest of his life. For him this was a glorious day which he was never to forget, and in later years he could assert: “If it were possible now to work a miracle in my case, I still would rather have taken part in that prodigious battle than be today free of my wounds without having been there.”

He continued his military career in the Tunis campaign in the fall of 1573, but by November of the following year his military service, in Italy, was at an end. That he had acquitted himself well is indicated by the letters of commendation to His Majesty that were given him by John of Austria himself and by the Duke of Sessa, the Spanish viceroy in Naples.

In September 1575 Miguel and his soldier brother Rodrigo embarked for Spain, but on the way they had the misfortune to be captured by Algerian pirates. As a captive Cervantes again exhibited remarkable courage and ingenuity and was the ringleader in a number of unsuccessful attempts at escape. Despite his rebellious spirit, he was treated rather well, it seems, by his Moorish master, who looked upon him as a person of some importance, worth a sizable ransom. After five years, his family and friends succeeded in raising a sum sufficient to procure his release, and by December 1580 he was back in Madrid. All this should be kept in mind as one reads the captive’s tale in Part I. The episode may sound romantic in the extreme, but its basis is factual. Cervantes was writing of something that had happened to himself.

He was by now thirty-three years of age, and in May 1581 we find him in the service of the King as a messenger. He may have had another taste of battle in the campaign of the Azores, though there is no evidence to this effect. It is known that during these years following his captivity he became the father of a natural daughter, Isabel, whose mother, possibly, was an actress. For his career as an aspiring playwright had begun, and he was also trying his hand at fiction. His first published literary work was an Arcadian romance, the Galatea, which, like its author, saw the light at Alcalá, in 1585. This, it is to be remembered, was the age of Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney in England, but it was from such Hispanic writers as Montemayor, Gil Polo, and Montalvo that Cervantes drew his inspiration.

While the Galatea was on the press, Cervantes married, on December 12, 1584, a lady by the name of Catalina de Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano, daughter of a peasant of Esquivias who seems to have been a man of means. Doña Catalina, however, brought her husband but a negligible dowry, and from then on he was saddled with family cares. They had no children, but for a good part of his life Miguel was to have a houseful of womenfolk to support; besides his wife, his two sisters, his daughter Isabel, a niece, and a maid-servant. The pair probably set up housekeeping at Esquivias and later moved to Seville. There, in 1587, he eked out a precarious livelihood by jobs of various sorts.

In 1588 he was appointed deputy purveyor to the fleet, his task being to requisition supplies for the Invincible Armada, preparations for which were under way at that time. The territory assigned him was Andalusia, and it was while roaming the countryside as a government commissary that he became familiar with the folk speech and folklore of that colorful province, an influence clearly to be discerned in Don Quixote.

His position was anything but a sinecure, and it was not long before he was in trouble. Having seized certain supplies belonging to the dean of the cathedral chapter at Seville, he was temporarily excommunicated; and on two, perhaps three, occasions—in 1592, 1597, and possibly again in 1602—he was thrown into jail because his accounts failed to balance.

For this the Andalusian peasants and not Cervantes were no doubt to blame. They must have made it hard for him, and his was the temperament of a poet, not that of an auditor. Schevill rightly sums the matter up when he says that these jail episodes are “insignificant and worthy of only the briefest consideration.” One thing that Cervantes the writer acquired from his prison experiences was a firsthand knowledge of underworld types, of which he was to make good use in his plays and stories.

It was in May 1590 that, obviously desirous of bettering his condition, he applied to the King for a New World appointment, only to be told that he should “look for something nearer home.” The poetry contest at Saragossa and the three silver spoons (1595) and Don Miguel’s sonnet “At the Bier of King Philip II in Seville” (1598) have been referred to earlier in this Introduction. From November 1598, at which time he was in Seville, until 1603, when he was summoned to Valladolid in connection with money due the government, the records are silent as to Cervantes’ whereabouts. He may have been living in retirement with his wife at Esquivias, or possibly at Valladolid; but in any event he must have been at work on Part I of the Don Quixote, which was off the press by the end of 1604.

The fame that this work brought its author even while he lived still does not enable us to penetrate to any extent the shadows that envelop the final decade of his life. His burdens, seemingly, were not appreciably lightened, and misfortunes continued to pursue him. About the time the book appeared upon the stalls, in 1605, he was involved in an investigation concerning the death of a nobleman who had been slain in a duel near the Cervantes’ home; and from 1605 to 1608 he disappears from view completely. From 1608 until his death his chief residence was at Madrid, where he labored upon the two productions that represent the ripened fruit of his creative powers: Part II of the Don Quixote and the Exemplary Novels,as well as upon his plays, his long poem, the Journey to Parnassus, and (assuming it was written at this time) his Persiles and Sigismunda. Thus, between the ages of fifty-eight and sixty-nine, did Miguel de Cervantes enjoy a youth of the mind and spirit that any writer well might envy. It is one of the miracles of literary history.

It may seem strange to us that he delayed so long in providing a sequel to a work that had achieved so startling a success as the Don Quixote. It surely would not happen today: one cannot conceive a best-selling author waiting ten years to cash in on his gains. But Cervantes had other irons in the fire. For one thing, he clung to his ambition to become a dramatist, and a year before his death his Eight Comedies and Eight Interludes, which, he tells us significantly, had “never been performed,” were given to the public by way of the printed page. And it is likely, too, that his shorter novelas (published under the title of Novelas Ejemplares in 1613) and his poetry (the Viaje del Parnaso appeared in 1614) took precedence with him over a tale that he was still inclined to look upon as something of a potboiler.

In any event, we are justified in believing that he worked on Part II by fits and starts. We have seen how careless he was with regard to revisions and the proof; and although he was in Madrid at the time this second part was on the press, he seems to have paid no attention to it, being more interested at that moment in his plays. On the other hand, even though he may have wearied of the theme upon occasion, and there is internal evidence that he did, there can be no doubt that he had come to realize the magnitude of his creation, a consciousness which was further heightened when, in 1614, there fell into his hands a “sequel” supposed to have been written by one Alonso Fernández de Ave-Ilaneda, “native of the town of Tordesillas.”

The Avellaneda volume is one of the most disgraceful performances in all literature. Wholly lacking in originality and stylistic grace, it is an utter betrayal of a great work, filled with vulgarities and obscenities of which Cervantes never would have been guilty, while the characters of Don Quixote and Sancho are debased beyond recognition. In addition, it contains a vicious personal attack on the original author, in the course of which his crippled hand—to him a glorious symbol of Lepanto—his old age, and his poverty are held up to ridicule. Who the real perpetrator of this outrage was, and what his motives were, are questions that have not as yet been answered.

The “apocryphal Don Quixote” had a galvanizing effect on the creator of the real one. Cervantes had reached Chapter LIX of his second part when Ave-Ilaneda’s book came into his possession. How he reacted to it may be seen from the later chapters that he wrote and from his angry but severely controlled Prologue. In a way, his embittered preoccupation with Ave-Ilaneda led him to distort the concluding portion of the narrative—and to kill off his hero once and for all to save him from being manhandled again.

The life of Miguel de Cervantes was a hard one, and his troubles were with him to the edge of the grave; nevertheless it would be a mistake to assume that his last years were spent in bitterness of spirit. His works, alone, would tell us that in spite of all disillusionments he had succeeded in preserving to the very end his profound humaneness and geniality; which must mean that, somewhere, there was an underlying faith to sustain him. He had had many buffetings, but there had also been flashes of splendor, and it is clear that he died with the conviction that his name would live. In his latter days he had two patrons, the Count of Lemos and the Archbishop of Toledo, but they did little to render his existence easier. Patrons were at best undependable, as he had found in the case of the Duke of Béjar, to whom he had dedicated Part I.

It was, rather, to the Church that he turned as the shadows fell and deepened. A couple of years before his death he joined the Tertiary Order of St. Francis, and it was the Franciscans who in 1616 carried him to his last, unknown resting place. Four days prior to his death, which occurred on April 23 of that year, he penned the Dedication to his Persiles, a touching farewell addressed to the Count of Lemos: “With one foot already in the stirrup, and with the agony of death upon me, great Lord, I write to you. Yesterday they gave me Extreme Unction.... The time is short, my pains are increasing, my hopes are diminishing; and yet, with it all, the desire I have to live keeps me alive.” It is at once a cry for life and a courageous acceptance of the inevitable.

III

As a writer, Cervantes in the realm of prose must be considered as the culminating and finest product of the siglo de oro, the period that in Spain witnessed the brilliant flowering of the Renaissance impulse. If we are to understand the man and his age, we must remember that this was the Spain not only of Lope de Vega, Góngora, Alarcón, Tirso de Molina, and Hurtado de Mendoza, but also of St. Theresa, John of the Cross, and El Greco—yes, and of the Counter-Reformation and the Inquisition as well. Contemporaries of Shakespeare, Camões, Tasso, Montaigne, and Ronsard, the creator of the Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha and his fellow writers belong to the later phase of the European renascence, such figures as Ariosto, Erasmus, and Sir Thomas More having disappeared from the scene in the course of the twenty years preceding Cervantes’ birth, while Rabelais died when Cervantes was but six years old. Calderón and Velázquez were yet to come, but the high point was reached with Part II of Don Quixote.

There has been in the past a good deal of misunderstanding as to the character of the Spanish Renaissance. This has been due to the effort of partisan, prejudiced, and often inadequately equipped literary historians to make the facts of the case fit a preconceived theory. Catholic Spain, we are told, held out against the Renaissance and effectively blocked it, with the Inquisition as the savage watchdog that suppressed all intellectual life and creative activity. That is the way it must be if the theory is correct, and so that is the way it is; and such commentators will accordingly assure us that the era in question was a barren one, unworthy of serious notice, when a mere listing of names would show that this was the most fruitful period in the entire history of Spanish letters.

There were, it is true, profound differences between the Renaissance spirit as manifested in the Iberian peninsula and the forms it assumed in Italy, France, and other countries. Aubrey Bell sums the matter up nicely by observing that Spain, like England, was not overwhelmed by the Humanist tide. In a land where, as Salvador de Madariaga puts it, the illiterates “speak like Seneca and sing like Blake,” the movement took on more of a deeply rooted popular and national character, and, like Sancho Panza himself, was at once less rationalistic and more realistic. What is to be seen here is a mingling of currents. The Italian Renaissance influence that came as a result of the southern wars found expression in the Arcadian theme and in the conceits of Góngora and his imitators; but alongside this more refined literature there existed another, that of the people, which is to be met with in the old cancioneros, or ballad collections, and in those romances of chivalry that, following the resurrection of Amadis of Gaul at the beginning of the sixteenth century, swept over the country like a deluge.

For the very reason that he is so thoroughly Spanish, Cervantes is not a “typical” Renaissance writer in the sense that Rabelais, for example, is—Rabelais who in his cloister had fought and won the battle of the forbidden Greek books. There rests upon Cervantes no burden of the New Learning; there will be found in his pages no wealth of classical allusions as in the Gargantua and Pantagruel. He was somewhat self-conscious in this regard, as is to be perceived from the Prologue to Part I of the Don Quixote, which may be taken as truth spoken in jest. A man of little formal schooling, he had but a slight acquaintance with the classics. Although he was not wholly untouched by Italy there are few traces of his experiences to be made out in his work, and such impressions as he does record seem superficial—a fact that may perhaps be explained by his confinement to camp and barracks. However, while his knowledge of the language was such as a soldier might pick up, he must have read Ariosto, Pulci, Boiardo, and other Italians whose influence to a greater or less extent is apparent in his work.

It is in his poems, by something of an effort which the reader cannot help feeling, that he comes nearest to the Renaissance-Humanist type. In his plays and novelas, though he is now and again seduced by the Arcadian motive, as in his Galatea and Persiles, his tendency always, at his best, is to depict the world about him and the flesh-and-blood characters he has known as soldier, captive, royal messenger, tax gatherer, hapless man of letters, and prison inmate. The rogue and the adventurer hold a special attraction for him (the germ of Don Quixote may be found in his “Rinconete and Cortadillo”), and in this he reveals an affinity with the picaresque novelists of his day, with writers like Quevedo and the author of Lazarillo de Tormes. In any case, it was the people, the common people of Spain, who inspired his most successful artistic creations. He can portray a peasant like Sancho Panza, Sancho’s wife or daughter, to perfection; but when he undertakes to give us a duke or a duchess, he is far less convincing and the result is likely to be a puppet rather than a character.

That Cervantes was sharply aware of the two audiences, the cultured and the popular one, in the Spain of his day, is clear from his own remarks in Don Quixote. His appeal was sometimes to one, sometimes to the other, but most often to the latter; and it was to the wider audience that he addressed his major work. Indeed, it might be said that it was he who brought the Renaissance to his people, just as Rabelais, who is otherwise so different, did in France. He was steeped in their literature, their magnificent old ballads and those foolishly inflated tales of wandering knights and damsels in distress of which they were so inordinately fond. Most of these romances he would, like the village curate, have consigned to the flames, but for the ballads he had a high esteem, as representing the work of the people themselves. And when he came to write Don Quixote, it was popular sources that he drew upon; for the theme of madness or monomania induced by reading books of chivalry was not original with Cervantes but may be traced as far back as the fourteenth century, and as late as 1597 it forms the subject of an interlude that may have afforded the stimulus for the creation of the Knight of La Mancha.

At this point, in view of the encomiums that have been lavished upon it, one may ask what it is that gives Don Quixote its outstanding importance in the field of fiction. What is it that makes this story the first truly modern novel and one of the greatest—many have said, the greatest—of all time? This is a question to which any intelligent reader with a critical sense that is at all developed should be able to find the answer for himself. Let him try an experiment. After laying down his Cervantes, let him take up Boccaccio or any teller of tales from the Greeks down to the seventeenth century, and he will quickly become conscious of a significant difference. Let him look more closely, and he will discover where that difference lies: in the delineation and growth of character and the dynamic psychological movement of the narrative. A Boccaccio character, for instance, is a social type, belonging to a fixed category and thereby incapable of any kind of internal evolution; things happen to him but not inside him, and in the end, with all his seeming quirks which are in reality the product of circumstance, he remains the same person that he was in the beginning, with the same view of life and the world.

Such, for centuries, had been the form that fiction assumed in Western Europe. Starting in the Alexandrian age as a picture of manners, it had continued, down through the Decameron, the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, the Heptameron, and the Gargantua and Pantagruel, to be just that and nothing more. Cervantes’ supreme merit lies in having broken the mold and introduced the element of dynamism. By so doing, as Krutch says, he discovered “the essential method of the modern novel.” This represents a rupture with the prevailing fictional forms of his day, the Arcadian romance on the one hand and the romance of chivalry on the other. His principal characters are anything but black or white; they are complex human beings who constantly change, grow, expand. They think about life and its meaning, and their thinking does things to them.

Could this conceivably be said of any character in Boccaccio? Can it be said of Gargantua (who has to be purged with “Anticyrian hellebore” before he is transformed), or of Pantagruel, or Panurge, or Friar John? If one contrasts them with the “simple” Sancho Panza, not to speak of his master, who is still an enigma to the wise, one perceives what cardboard creatures they are, however diverting. Rabelais was a great Humanist, a great master of the comic, but he did not advance the art of fiction as Cervantes did.

In Don Quixote it is not only the characters that grow: we can see the author growing with them. This again is a trait of the significant, worth-while modern novelist, and one that had not appeared before. It may have been Cervantes’ original intention to compose a tale “for the entertainment of the peoples,” but before he had finished he found himself plumbing the depths of human existence, confronting the most profound of philosophic problems: that of appearance and reality, of being and non-being. Don Quixote and Sancho each represent one aspect of this problem, and the manner in which they are portrayed as complementing and reacting upon each other constitutes an artistic achievement of the first order. Each becomes more like the other, and the two may be looked upon as embodying the drama and the dialogue that is taking place in Cervantes’ mind and soul; he learns from them, and as he learns, his stature as an artist increases.

It is with good reason, then, that Coleridge, Brandes, Yeats, and others have spoken of Cervantes in the same breath with the Shakespeare of Lear and Hamlet. Both men wrote out of stern necessity and the tensions of the spirit, and by the gift of genius were able to turn what might have been potboilers into great works of art. With Cervantes, this process of spiritual growth on the part of the author is reflected in the far greater depth and maturity of the second part of Don Quixote—though there are some, Thomas Mann among them, who still prefer Part I.

In recent years there has been a good deal of controversy as to whether or not Don Quixote is an “accidental” masterpiece. “The book grew without any definite plan,” says Schevill; and with this a number of earlier highly respected Cervantes scholars would agree. “Never,” Ormsby declares, “was a great work so neglected by its author.” “The most careless great book in the world,” is the judgment of W. P. Ker. In fact, from Diego Clemencín to Rodriguez Marín, we find those who would more or less assent to Benedetto Croce’s assertion that “Cervantes was not fully aware of his own genius.” The present trend, however, appears to be away from this view and toward a frequently exaggerated conception of the author’s initial awareness. The textual discrepancies, we are assured, are not in reality slips of the pen but are due to a metaphysical disdain for the factual. All of which—if the academic specialists will pardon me for saying so—impresses me as being the result of overspecialization, with a tendency to erect a sort of esoteric Cervantes cult.

The man who wrote Don Quixote could not have been an unconscious artist, we will grant that, and there is ample evidence in the work itself to show that he was constantly thinking about the forms that he practiced: fiction, poetry, and the drama. Singleton has predicted that “the intellectual and artistic life of Cervantes will eventually be clearly shown to have been a slow, conscious, and completely coherent process” (Schevill phrased it: “he required years to be born”), and I am willing to accept the hypothesis; for a Don Quixote is not created out of the void, and this would explain the late ripening of so amazing a talent. The only thing is, I would put a question mark after the words “completely coherent” as being inapplicable, I suspect, to the development of any individual, and above all, to that of one so life-battered as we know Cervantes was.

But this does not mean that we must at the same time accept the statement that the author knew from the start he was creating a master work and had definitely plotted it out. Both the external and the internal evidence are against the supposition. After the opening chapters, which deal with the knight’s first sally, there are signs of a distinct break, as if Cervantes had suddenly changed and broadened his plan; and throughout Part I, with its interpolated pastoral episodes and old-fashioned novelas, there is a certain unsureness, a groping between the old and hackneyed and the new and original—in a manner, a feeling of the public’s pulse—that is wholly absent from Part II, a fact of which the author in his Prologue shows himself to be aware. This phenomenon of growth, the growth of the creator with his creation, is, when all is said, the most marvelous thing about the book.

An idolatrous attitude is of no service to any writer or any work. However great the critic’s admiration and even reverence, it is not his business to endeavor to explain away every fault and shortcoming, every failure, and to insist that all the author wrote is perfect, the result of subtle or far-seeing design. Cervantes was a fine artist, there is no question as to that, though he did not prove it, did not develop fully, until he neared the seventh decade of his life; but he was also very human and he labored under tremendous odds. As a delineator of character he is thoroughly original and unrivaled when at his best, yet not all his characters come to life; as he goes upward in the social scale, treading less familiar ground, his portraits lose in depth, and his women on the whole (unless they are peasants, like Teresa and her daughter) are shadowy creatures as compared to the men; as for Dulcinea, who represents the only “heart interest” outside of the episodes in Part I, she is, of course, no more than a meaningful figment. And his art of character-drawing and storytelling breaks down completely when he tries to make convincing Fernando’s sudden and utterly unrealistic change of heart toward Dorotea.

The basis of Cervantes’ art is an essential realism based upon “verisimilitude and the imitation of nature.” He himself tells us this in connection with his criticism of the romances of chivalry, in Part I, Chapter XLVII. The real is here to be understood as the true rather than as “fact,” or the truth that our senses give us, and the artist’s task is to see that “the impossible is made to appear possible” through being clothed in the familiar. In its complete fusion, at once homely and poetic, of fantasy and reality, Don Quixote is unique among works of literature. Its dominant quality is invention, the play of the creative imagination; and in achieving his effects, the author relies upon his graphic powers of description and his close-to-life, astonishingly modern-sounding dialogue, which, as Schevill notes, becomes a “process of self-revelation” on the part of the speaker. His scenes are really pictorial, and he is notably adept at describing the costume (especially feminine costume) and personal appearance of his characters. All this, the description and the dialogue, points to a keenly perceptive observation of daily life and a wide experience with his fellow men; Cervantes was in no sense an Ivory Tower writer.

One cannot speak of Don Quixote without mentioning Cervantes’ humor, which is inseparably associated with his fantasy and which has caused him to be compared to Shakespeare, Sterne, and Swift among English writers. It is an expression of the Comic Spirit—“the richer laughter of heart and mind in one”—that Meredith fully appreciated. It is a humor that has nothing to do with the hearty, rumbling belly-laugh of a Rabelais, expressive of physical well-being and a joy in living and in new-found horizons such as characterized the earlier stages of the Renaissance. This is a metaphysical humor the essence of which lies in a startling juxtaposition of the incongruous; and it finds a perfect embodiment, not in the protagonist of the tale, who evokes tears more often than laughter, but in Sancho Panza, who has been termed “the most humorous creation in the whole range of fiction.” Nor is there any dependence here upon the smutty jest or upon levity with regard to the Church and accepted institutions; instead, the author could boast that his was “the least harmful of any book that has been published up to now.”

As a prose writer, master of a beautifully pure and limpid Castilian, Cervantes is the best that the Golden Age has to show, neither Lope nor Quevedo being comparable to him in this regard. His native style is admirably terse, vigorous, and direct, and reminds one somewhat of Swift’s. He has his faults, to be sure, and there are occasional traces of “fine” writing, possibly due to the Góngora influence; but, on the whole, he is true to the apothegm that occurs twice in the Don Quixote: “Toda afectación es mala”—“All affectation is bad.”

The discussion thus far has been confined almost exclusively to the Don Quixote, but we must not forget that other masterly work that Cervantes has left us, the Exemplary Novels, unfortunately little known to American readers though it has had a ponderable effect upon the literature of England and the Continent. There are two translations, one by N. Maccoll, the other by Walter K. Kelly, the former being by far the better of the two, but both have long been out of print and are difficult to procure. This is to be regretted; had they been accessible, these novels would surely have made themselves felt by writers and by students of the art of fiction generally. There are some who see in the Novelas Ejemplares Cervantes’ most mature production from the point of view of a highly conscious and refined literary artistry.

It is Cervantes the fiction writer who is presented in the following pages. Like Fielding and Smollett, he was unsuccessful as a dramatist. It may be that he was too much the realist to adapt himself to the Spanish theater of his time—Lope de Vega, let us remember, was a very ordinary novelist. The best of Cervantes’ dramatic work is contained in the Entremeses,or Interludes, recently rendered available in English in the distinguished translation of S. Griswold Morley. There would, accordingly, appear to be little reason for including any of the theatrical pieces in a volume of this sort; and the same is true of the poems, which were adequately translated by James Y. Gibson, in the 1880s. That the author of Don Quixote was at heart a poet few would deny, but he did not often succeed in achieving a formal expression in verse that was above the mediocre.

So much for the work. To undertake to trace its influence upon the principal cultures of the world would be a stupendous task, requiring volumes and the cooperation of many minds. A mere list of the more important of the world’s writers who in one way or another have felt the breath of the Cervantine spirit must of necessity sound like a catalogue. In France, to mention but a few, we should encounter such names as Molière, Voltaire, Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, and Victor Hugo. In Germany, thanks in good part to Cervantes’ translator, Ludwig Tieck, Don Quixote was caught up into the full tide of the Romantic movement, and Goethe, Jean Paul Richter, Schiller, Heine, Hofmannsthal, Hegel, Lessing, Humboldt, Schlegel, Novalis, Wieland, Grillparzer, Immermann, Herder, Klinger—all bear witness to his presence. And Dostoevski was not the only one in Russia; there were Push-kin, Turgenev, Gogol (Dead Souls, like The Idiot, drew inspiration from this source). It is not impossible that Shakespeare read Part I of Don Quixote in Shelton’s translation, and Butler’s Hudibras owes much to the Spanish masterpiece. Beaumont and Fletcher, especially, made use of the Exemplary Novels. Fielding wrote his Joseph Andrews “in imitation of the manner of Cervantes” and composed a comedy or ballad-opera entitled Don Quixote in England. Sterne, Smollett, Defoe, Richardson, Swift, Pope, Johnson, Addison, Steele, Wordsworth, Scott, Byron, Lamb, Coleridge, Meredith, Francis Thompson, Arthur Machen, and Wyndham Lewis are among those who have enjoyed and paid tribute to the Knight of La Mancha.

In America, although much remains to be done in tracing it, the Cervantes influence is clearly seen to be less than elsewhere. It shows unmistakably in Irving and Melville and in Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. We have heard Howells’ opinion, we know that Hawthorne admired the Exemplary Novels, and Professor Harry Levin would find a certain relation between the Quixotic spirit and the flight of a Henry James or the mood of disillusionment of such contemporary novelists as Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, James T. Farrell, and others. He also discovers “a striking resemblance to that expatriate waste land which T. S. Eliot invokes.” It is a long way from La Mancha to Main Street and from Don Quixote to Studs Lonigan, but there may be something in it for all that.

IV

Any intelligent reader of Don Quixote, in the course of the story or upon laying it down, must inevitably ask himself: What was the author’s intention in writing the book—aside from that of earning a little much-needed money? And this question will be followed by another: What is the outlook upon the world, the life view, that is here given body and substance?

Recalling all the “explanations” and “interpretations” that have been advanced by editors, commentators, scholars, and critics, one is inclined to accept Ortega y Gasset’s picture of a tired Cervantes seated in the Elysian Fields and waiting—waiting for a comprehension which he hopes posterity may bestow. No other book, unless it is the Bible, ever came so near to meaning all things to all men. Children and the simple of heart still can revel in the pure entertainment it affords; and for long after the author’s death, imperceptive adults who were far from simple continued to look upon it as a farcical work, the English “wits” being especially to blame here, though the French were not far behind them. When at last it came to be taken seriously, the hunt for meanings and hidden motives began, and the commentators were in their element. Attempts were even made to identify Don Quixote with Ignatius Loyola, the Emperor Charles V, and other real-life personages.

One of the most widespread misconceptions of the past was popularized by Byron, who asserted that Cervantes had “smiled Spain’s chivalry away.” It was such a view as this that led Ruskin, after having praised the novel highly ten years before, to turn against it and condemn it as a “deadly book,” for the reason that “all true chivalry is thus by implication accused of madness and involved in shame.” Had they given the matter a little thought, both critic and poet should have remembered that chivalry as a formalized institution died with the Middle Ages, while the knight-errant, in any case, was a romantic creation rather than a historic reality. What Cervantes was attacking, insofar as he was attacking anything, was not the chivalric principle, which the hero of Lepanto undoubtedly respected, but a false and aesthetically repugnant variety of tale that had grown up around the subject of knighthood; and here his aim was so effective that no further romance of this kind appeared after the publication of Part I. Richardson, in the following century, was to undertake much the same task when he sat down to write his Pamela.

In other words, Cevantes’ purpose was not social but, as it took shape in his mind, aesthetic and philosophic in character. Notwithstanding the fact that he has given us what has rightly been termed “the great social novel of Spain at the beginning of the seventeenth century” as well as “the best essay ever written on the Spanish national character,” he is in no wise a reformer. He may be capable of extracting a sublime humor from an attempt to turn back the clock of history, but he evidences no desire to turn it forward. In fact, such evidence as we have is on the other side. Old soldier that he was, he exhibits an intense and, I believe, wholly unfeigned loyalty to Church and King and the laws and institutions of his land; and more than one attitude that he reveals on the questions of his age—on the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Moors, toward the “founders of new sects and ways of life,” on censorship and licensing, to mention but a few—would today earn him the epithet of reactionary from those who are ever ready with their labels.

After reading and rereading Don Quixote many times and studying every line and word, as a translator must, I remain unconvinced by Professor Castro’s theory to the effect that Cervantes wrote with tongue in cheek and dissimulated his real views in order to evade the censures of the Holy Office. The argument is an ingenious one, based largely upon textual and linguistic interpretations, but it may be met with an equal degree of ingenuity, as Aubrey Bell and Father Rubio have shown. In the end, one who knows the author must rely upon his own feeling, in the absence of specific and dependable data; and for myself I can but think of Rabelais, in whom I also had a thorough immersion. Maitre François familiarized me with the tongue-in-cheek attitude, and I can only say that I find nothing of the sort in Cervantes. Even Castro is compelled to admit that “beyond the shadow of a doubt, Cervantes was a good Catholic,” though an audacious one like Erasmus and other Renaissance thinkers outside of Spain.

To accept such a view, however, one must either ignore the distinct character of the Spanish Renaissance or else assume that Cervantes was not representative of it. Casalduero speaks of “the Catholic Cervantes, a Catholic of his epoch, that is, of the Counter-Reformation,” a description with which Helmut Hatzfeld would agree, and this seems to me a much more reasonable estimate. Cervantes’ Catholicism, like that of the Spanish people, the Sanchos and their kind, was so deeply ingrained that he could afford now and then to smile—he never laughs boisterously—at the observances and ministers of religion but he is at bottom a fervent Catholic and essentially a Catholic writer. I cannot believe, as a number of authorities have held, that he was indifferent to theological and philosophical speculation; his theology, out of the Spain of St. Ignatius and St. Theresa and St. John of the Cross, is the bridge to a philosophy that becomes the major theme of his work, conferring upon it a special interest for the student of the novel.

The world of social relationships, for Cervantes as for Don Quixote, has always something of an air of unreality and illusion, or at most, of relativity, in confrontation with and in reference to the ideal and the absolute. If there are problems to be solved, the solution lies inside man, not in external circumstance; and he who starts out to set the world right is embarking upon a truly Quixotic enterprise. This is the other aspect of the Knight of La Mancha. He has commonly been regarded as a reactionary with an idée fixe, but he may quite as well be looked upon as “the prototype of the modem utopian who spends himself in the interest of the general good and makes himself guilty of many a particular evil, as Don Quixote does when he comes to the rescue of the farmer’s lad, Andrés. This is that third type of comedy of which Auden speaks, ”based on a sense that the relations of the individual and society to each other and of both to the true good contain insoluble contradictions which are not so much comic as ironic.”

We are thus brought to the question of Don Quixote’s “madness,” on which the meaning of the book hinges. Though the psychiatrists occasionally have tried to claim him, it should no longer be necessary to point out that his is no ordinary case of insanity, mental derangement, or “abnormality” of any kind. Hence the old objection that it is cruel to laugh at the actions of the insane does not stand; and any adult who gets no more than this out of the story had best put it aside. In the admirable statement of Waldo Frank, “Don Quixote ... is a man possessed: not a madman”; and there is all the difference in the world between the two. He is fully aware of the true character of his hallucinations; he knows, for example, that enchanters do not actually transform shapes but merely appear to do so; and with this realization, exit the madman, enter the poet-philosopher, intent upon defending the rights of the imagination—the poet in action. In this sense, one feels like exclaiming with Merimée: “Pity the man who has not had some of Don Quixote’s ideas!” The Surrealists, if they would leave their Freudian baggage behind, might find something here (Dali caught the spirit), but it will be barren ground for the psychoanalyst as for the sociologist.

With the Cervantes of Part II we are in an intellectual, speculative-metaphysical stratosphere where “conditioning,” whether social or psychological, will explain nothing, and the id and libido and economic determinism may as well be discarded. This is the realm into which a dazed Pontius Pilate once stumbled. What is truth? What is the truth behind the show of things? And in how far is a man justified in fashioning for himself a truer truth that may serve his soul’s need—Così è (se vi pare)—RightYou Are, If You Think You Are—the modern Pirandello theme? As Eric Bentley has pointed out, this is also the theme of Shaw and Chaplin, who, like Pirandello, must have been born “under the sign of Cervantes.” In this respect, Don Quixote is the first work, the first comedy, of its kind, embodying a humor based upon the incongruous clash of reality and appearance and not to be dissociated from that “tragic sense of life” that haunts Unamuno.

Joseph Wood Krutch has observed that Cervantes is here stating “the chief intellectual problem of his age in a novel”; and one of the finest of American critics, Lionel Trilling, further notes that this problem, that of illusion and reality, is the novelist’s supreme concern. I will act, says Don Quixote, as ifthe world were what I would have it be, as if the ideal were the real. He is under no delusion regarding his lady Dulcinea: “God knows whether or not there is a Dulcinea in this world ... I contemplate her as she needs must be [como conviene que sea].” Can anyone today read this passage without a start, without thinking of Kierkegaard and Sartre and the Existentialists? In Cervantes’ time it was Augustine and Plato. It was Plato and Augustine versus Aristotle; for what we have here is a manifestation, in Spanish Counter-Reformationist terms, of that late Renaissance revival of Platonism that had begun in the sixteenth century, with Marguerite of Navarre as its leading exponent in France.

It is, to repeat, this conflict of ideas that in Part II becomes the major theme and takes over the story—this, and not the attack on the books of chivalry, which persists as a fictional device, nothing more. And it is through the interplay, the constant spoken and unspoken dialogue between the knight and his squire, that the drama is realized. Sancho Panza is not a personification of common sense, as he is commonly supposed to be; he too has his “island,” and his attitude toward the problem of reality is essentially the same as that of his master; he views the matter from a different angle, that is all. He is the man of the people who has been seduced into following the man of the study on a highly dangerous adventure, and one fares no better than the other.

What is the moral of the tale? Opinions differ, just as they do regarding the character of the hero and the nature of his madness. The knight’s final overthrow is, assuredly, one of the saddest episodes ever contrived. Does it mean, as Thomas Mann sees it, no more than a “bitter and disillusioned submission to vulgar reality” such as constitutes “the essence of humor”? It is to be suspected that the author of The Magic Mountain is fashioning a Don Quixote in his own image; but isn’t that what we all do? Aubrey Bell, on the other hand, discovers in the marvelous deathbed scene with which the book closes a spiritual victory in the form of a self-purification; and he would find the moral in the housekeeper’s admonition: “Stay at home, attend to your affairs, go often to confession, be charitable to the poor....”

This latter view, it should be stressed, does not of necessity imply an unquestioning acceptance of things as they are, the status quo, but has to do, rather, with the individual and his personal vision of his inner self in relation to a solid-seeming but insubstantial universe. I was recently reminded of the housekeeper’s words when I read in Käthe Kollwitz’s diary the following entry: “... I am not only allowed to finish my work, I am bidden to finish it. This, it seems to me, is the meaning of all the talk about civilization. It can exist only where each individual fills his own personal sphere of duty. If everybody recognizes and takes upon himself the duty to which he is called, genuine life will result. The civilization of an entire nation cannot be based on anything else.”

It sounds like a homely, prosaic lesson, but a man may have to go through hell to learn it. If he is a thinking man, he may have to draw aside a curtain that had best be left undrawn, since the tragicomic spectacle revealed is one that can only lead to madness in the eyes of those who remain on the other side. It is with good reason that Melville puts Don Quixote alongside Hamlet and the Satan of Paradise Lost.

Yet, with it all, was there ever a more genial work? Don Quixote is at once the saddest and the most serene of masterpieces. In Part I, Chapter L, we are told of a certain knight-errant who dives to the bottom of a lake of pitch and there has a rewarding vision. Cervantes must have had a comparable experience upon the intellectual plane. That, it may be, is the meaning of his twilight smile—but one might as well attempt to wrest the secret of El Greco!